After Grandma Lila died, Ben and I felt a little bit aimless for a few days. We knew there were things that needed to be done and decisions that needed to be made, but we were very tired. The past few months kind of caught up to us and we had difficulty getting motivated to do anything but putter around and sleep.

However, even if we weren't motivated we knew a few things had to be done right away and they were going to take a pretty big output of effort.

The first thing was we had to decide what to do about our unfinished wood floors.

When Grandma Lila first got sick, we were in the middle of laying the wood floor in the addition. When she went into the hospital the second time, our family saw a golden opportunity to sand the floors and finish them since they knew a big part of the difficulty of doing this had always been how to move and care for Grandma during that process and since she wasn't in the house and wasn't going to be for a few days, they had high hopes of getting this big task out of the way.

However, when we decided there was nothing more to be done at the hospital and we needed to bring Grandma home as soon as possible, there was an instant work stoppage. The condition of the floors at that point was that they had received a first rough sanding in the old part of the house and only edge sanding in the new part. So we had unfinished, unprotected wood floors we had to take as much care of as possible to prevent the wood from absorbing anything that would in the future hinder it from taking stain or finish. Not an easy task under normal circumstances, but we also had a toddler and were caring for a bedridden elderly lady, both of whom present unusual challenges to keeping anything from getting on the floor. We didn't eat popcorn for two months because we couldn't risk Abigail leaving popcorn around for the oil to seep into the wood and then prevent it from accepting stain later in those spots.

Mom Turner came through in her usual creative fashion and put old patio carpet over large sections of the floor, especially in the kitchen area. She and Ben also found a large old area rug in an estate sale across the street to put under our table - another trouble spot. Even so, over the course of the next few months a lot of small spots and stains showed up on the floor and we were getting a little uneasy about leaving them much longer and risking permanent damage.

The thing was...we had a due date in three weeks. That meant we were cutting things right down to the wire to expect to pack up everything in our house, move somewhere else, completely finish the floors, and move back in before the birth of our baby...who we were expecting to give birth to at home.

If we didn't do it, though, we would have to wait for the baby to be born and then for me to recover enough so that I could work on packing up and moving our house and be comfortable taking the new baby somewhere else. If I had a long recovery after the birth, this meant we could be delaying another two months on finishing the floor, plus have to do all of that work while caring for - and having to stop and nurse! - a newborn. Not optimal, in our opinion.

So two days after Grandma's death, we took a deep breath and began packing. This took a lot of work because we had to put away all Grandma's things in the process. Mom Turner was again a trooper and spent hours sorting and packing and throwing out and going to thrift stores so we could not only move the things out of the rooms, but have everything in good condition to easily and quickly move back into when the floors were done.

Personally, I've probably never been so exhausted in my life. Mom says she gained a whole bunch of new gray hairs and I think I may have too.

In the meantime, Ben and I were trying to adjust to what life was like now that Grandma was no longer a responsibility. Should Abigail and I go to the office with him every day, for example? How should we arrange things like visiting with our other grandparents? It was strange having the freedom to consider these things. It was also strange to leave the house without making any special arrangements and get back whenever we decided to come home. We moved all our bedroom stuff to the new room so that the wood floors in our old room were cleared and that meant we were sleeping in a room with a window for the first time in months. It was wonderful, but it also meant Abigail was waking up at 6:30 every morning with the unaccustomed light and figuring it was time to be up rather than going back to sleep. Between our disrupted sleep schedule, our house looking like a hurricane hit it as we pulled things apart and packed them into boxes and carted everything down into the basement, and our sudden new travels all over - we do admit we went a lot of places just because we could just get in the car and go - things were definitely not normal. And running through everything was the concern that we really, really, REALLY needed to hurry because this baby was going to be coming soon.

Babies have the unfortunate tendency to not be born on a timetable. However, our midwife was going out of town for a few days and she visited right before she left and brought her assistant Amy, who would be the one to come help if we happened to go into labor during that time. I wasn't actually too concerned. I'd always thought this baby would be late since Abigail was right on time and first babies are often early. Furthermore, the baby's head was still fairly high and wasn't engaged yet, indicating we still had the time until the due date around July 4th. Our families scolded me every time I picked up anything and said I needed to quit lifting things and rest more, but in my mind there was so much to be done resting wasn't much of an option and while I would concede I shouldn't lift anything heavy, there was a lot of stuff that needed moving which wasn't heavy. My motto for a long time has been "don't put something off for tomorrow that you have time to do today" and that mindset was in full swing for the two weeks after Grandma's death.

Besides, I told myself and everyone else, babies are not born when they aren't ready to be unless there is a bad accident or some very extenuating circumstances. They tend to stay pretty firmly put until the time they're ready to be born, as anyone who's tried to encourage labor to start can ruefully tell you.

And this baby was going to be born in July. I was quite positive about this. I even talked about it being nice if we could go a week late and hit Elaina's birthday on the 12th, since that was only a week from due and we've remembered her birthday every year since she was born - it would be nice, I reasoned, to actually have someone living born on that day to remember.

Sometimes I think mindsets like this must make God chuckle. Right as he decides to remind us that he makes the rules and the timetables are really not up to us at all.

I was going to post about our last few weeks all at once, but it got to be very long and I thought it might be better to break it into three parts and give myself a few days between parts.

Grandma Lila died June 9, 2014.

Even though we all knew it was coming, it was kind of a shock that it actually happened. For one thing, when we brought Grandma home from the hospital, it looked for all the world like she only had a few days left with us. She was nearly unresponsive, wasn't eating or drinking anything, and was doing steadily worse by the day.

Then she bounced back. She was more herself than she'd ever been, clear-headed and rational and wanting to eat. We could still tell she wasn't really on the road to recovery, but for a week or so there we were honestly doubting the doctor's opinion and even began making plans how to help her get better for a time.Things did go downhill from there. First there was a kind of happy delirium in which Grandma acted like a happily intoxicated person most of the time but was pretty clearly not rational. This continued for about two months until suddenly a week before she died she became very, very sad. I think some part of her knew she wasn't going to get better and that she didn't feel well but she wasn't really able to express those things anymore because her mind had become very much like that of a little child. She compared herself to Abigail all the time, spoke "baby talk" and had a list of needs that was pretty simple: "Squatch my back!", "I'm hungry", "I want to get up" and "take me to the bathroom" became her nearly constant litany. What became difficult about this the last week was that she became desperate about those things and didn't recognize when they were being given to her. She would say, "I want water! I want water!" and would continue asking like that even with the water in her hand or even on a sponge in her mouth. She didn't seem to be able to understand that she had been given what she required because I think she knew she needed something else but couldn't really identify what.

I have always had difficulty with what I saw especially in Hospice situations as the tendency to tranquilize a dying person right into death. I have a different perspective now that might help any other "me" kind of people reading: when we finally made a decision to begin giving Grandma stronger tranquilizers, we did it because of her desperation and how badly she was feeling. It was like watching someone in great pain only she wasn't really in pain. Her mind wasn't able to tell her what was going on. Causing her to become sleepy gave her relief much like giving pain killer would and while it felt a little wrong to do in some ways since we knew we weren't going to have many more days with her, her last few days were much more peaceful than the week that had gone before. Her last drowsy conversation with Ben went something like this:

Ben: "Hi Grandma. How are you feeling? Would you like the windows open?"
Grandma: "Yes...I'd like that."
Ben, after opening the windows and then stroking Grandma's head a little: "There, Lila. We're taking good care of you."
Grandma: "You sure are..."
Ben: "I love you, Grandma Lila."
Grandma: "I love you too, Ben..."

The next night Ben was up most of the night with her since she kept crying and calling for help. We couldn't tell what was wrong, but we did notice she was having a much harder time breathing since her skin was getting bluer and we were giving her oxygen for the first time. By morning, she didn't seem able to talk anymore and we gave her some medicine hoping to help her breathe easier. She eventually fell asleep to me reading Abigail stories while I sat next to her and never woke again. She slept all day and we could tell her time was very short since her breathing became very rapid and shallow and her color kept getting duskier even though we had the oxygen up as high as it could go. She was still much more peaceful than she had been all week, no longer trying to climb out of bed or making frantic requests we couldn't grant.

Later in the afternoon, I called the Hospice nurse and told her that I didn't think Grandma had much time and asked if they wanted to come by or if there was anything they needed done for their benefit, since they arrange calling people and taking care of things after someone dies. The nurse on call was a lady we'd seen once before and really liked and she came out to the house around 5:00 to see Grandma and assess what was going on. She told us that Grandma's heart was still pretty strong considering the condition she was in and that her breathing was at what was considered a normal rate with no pauses, so we were probably looking at being up that night with her but she agreed Grandma did not have much time with us. Mom called Jenny and told her what was going on and Jenny decided to stop here on the way home from work and I started the barbecue since it was time for dinner and it looked like we'd better feed everyone since it was going to be a long night.

It was a beautiful warm summery evening and we had all the windows open in the house since we don't have air conditioning yet. Jenny arrived and came in and rubbed Grandma's head and said hello to her even though Grandma was sleeping. Mom and the nurse and I were going to clean Grandma a little since she was having some issues with her insides and we wanted her to be as comfortable as possible, so Jenny took Abigail for a walk on the path in the backyard we call "Lila Boulevard" since we built it to easily get Grandma back and forth from our house to Mom and Dad's. As the weather had gotten warmer and the dandelions bloomed, Ben taught Abigail to pick them and bring them to Grandma, since in her delirious state she would make a big deal about the "pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty flowers" that "the little girl with the curly hair" brought her - she would even make up little songs about it. When Jenny and Abigail came back, Abigail ran to me with a dandelion held out proudly. I thought she had brought it for me, but Abigail pointed to Grandma's bed and said, "Wa-wa?"

"You want me to give this to Grandma Lila?" I asked her.

"I do," she said - lately if you ask her a question she wants to answer "yes" to, she says "I do".

"Grandma's sleeping right now, but I'll put it right here on her lap so she'll see it when she opens her eyes," I told Abigail. 

Then I went and got Abigail some raisins. Our family was all sitting in Grandma's new bright room with the windows open, since we had kind of gathered together to hear what the nurse would have to say. We were chatting about how Grandma's last year has been, since earlier in the day Mom had been keeping her company and putting pictures in an album from the past year and it had been amazing all the things Grandma had gotten to do and participate in. Suddenly Jenny said, "You know, Grandma's head has been moving with every breath but it's not moving now. Is she breathing?"

I looked at Grandma, who didn't really look any differently than she had all day and said, "Um...I think so. Maybe her breathing has just gotten more shallow?"

But after a few more seconds, I realized I really couldn't see any sign of Grandma breathing. I got up off the floor where I'd been sitting and feeding Abigail raisins and went over to Grandma and put my hand on her chest. I couldn't feel her breathing, but I thought I could feel her heart beating. The nurse came back in the room from having made a phone call and I looked up at her and said, "I can't tell if Grandma is breathing but I think I feel her heart."

The nurse came and put her stethoscope on Grandma's chest and listened for a little while, then looked at me and shook her head a little. "I can't hear anything," she said quietly. "She's gone."

So Grandma left us on a warm summer evening with her whole family sitting around her visiting and talking about her life of the past year while her great-granddaughter who had never lived in a house without her laid on the floor by her bed humming and peacefully eating raisins after having brought a dandelion in especially for her. It was the kind of way a lot of people might ask to die if we were given the chance to make that request.

People have asked me over the past few weeks what I thought of Grandma's view on death and if she believed she would be with God someday when she died. I was never really able to tell exactly what Grandma thought, partly because she wasn't necessarily clear-headed enough to discuss it due to medications and forgetfulness issues and partly because I just wasn't able to really tell what she thought. I know she was very afraid to die, mostly because I think she was afraid it was going to hurt. Honestly, in the end I don't think it did. Most days Ben would ask her how she was doing and she would cheerfully say, "Oh, pretty good!" which is better than she usually said when she was actually in better health.

Whatever Lila thought, however, I do know God loved Lila very much and gave her some pretty incredible blessings in her life, especially in the part of her life I was present for. As we realized months ago when we realized Grandma was "dying", a person actually lives right up to the second they die.  The question always is...what kind of life are they living right up until that second? 

Grandma lived a special and comfortable life full of things and people she loved right until the second she left us. That was evidence of how much God loves her. Not only was her life very blessed with good things, but there were also bad things she was always afraid of that never came to pass. She always thought she was going to get cancer or that she would have another heart attack - she was terrified of those things. She was also afraid of being put in an institution somewhere until she died. One of the reasons she came to live with us in the first place was because our family decided together that we would do whatever we could to fulfill one of her most firmly-held wishes: to never, ever end up in a nursing home. That became one of our goals, that whatever we had to do to care for her, we would strive to do from home. In the moment that Grandma died, for me there was an incredible sense of peace because together our family had accomplished something good we had set out to do and we had not failed. It was like finishing a race for everyone and that meant we could all rest when Grandma rested. We were privileged to be given to each other and we were given the strength not to abandon each other.

So in a few seconds on the evening of June 9th as we sat together peacefully talking around Lila's bed, the number of days God had given her - a little over 91 years - came to a very gentle and quiet end.

Dad had visited the farmer's market a few days earlier and brought back some rhubarb with the request for a pie and I had made it the day before forgetting Dad was leaving overnight for a fishing trip. I hadn't had enough rhubarb for a straight-up rhubarb pie, so I used strawberries from the freezer and made a strawberry-rhubarb pie instead, then saved the whole pie when I realized Dad wasn't going to be there to eat it. Over the course of the day Grandma died, Mom happened to hear on the radio that June 9th was National Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie Day and we had gotten a chuckle out of the fact we just happened to have one to share. After we had gone through all the formal things that had to be done after Grandma's death, like disposing of her medication and signing paperwork and making various other arrangements, we took the pie next door and sat on the patio together sharing pie and ice cream and talking about Grandma and Grandpa. Sort of like people would do after a funeral when there's a meal and people are no longer crying. Mom says this is probably going to be a new tradition, where we have strawberry-rhubarb pie on National Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie Day and remember Grandma Lila dying so quietly and peacefully that beautiful June evening in 2014.

As a tradition remembering the end of someone's life goes, I think Grandma Lila would've liked that one. She surely did enjoy her ice cream, especially the last few months of her life.

Sleep well, Grandma Lila. We love you.