April 22, 2002
My Grandma
Watched Pearl Harbor last night. Bawled my fucking eyes out. I swear I cried for the last forty-five minutes of the movie. Non-stop. The action was brilliant, and made the entire ordeal seem real to me for the first time. The shot where they were busting open the hull, and the men's hands were reaching desperately upward only to fall limp...
And I just knew they were going to kill Josh Hartnett. I liked Danny better than Rafe, and I didn't like Evelyn at all. I wanted to cry when she told Danny she loved him, 'cause you knew she didn't.
They always whack the non-flashy character. I liked him better. He was innocent, possessed of a more honest charm.
So there's me on my couch at 2:30 in the morning, weeping uncontrollably. War just never seems real to me. To think that such desperate decisions must be made, that so many lives are lost. To think that there could be a moment in your life, or someone else's, where you know you are about to die, that is a horrible thing. We are so fleeting, so fragile.
I haven't really had to face much death in my life. My grandpa died when I was nine, my grandma when I was about fourteen. I remember her last few days real vividly, and it was a more difficult thing to swallow that she was suffering than she was about to die. Mom and Justin and I went to the nursing home to visit her, and she had broken her arm and her hip. She was on a bunch of drugs at the time, and was so skinny she was too weak to do much of anything for herself. A nurse came and fed her a few bites of some pudding, then left her the rest of it to feed herself.
She couldn't lift the spoon.
I just sat in a chair next to her bed and cried. Mom didn't try to console me, and grandma was trying to talk but her voice was so soft I couldn't hear her. Mom leaned close to listen. She was asking why I was crying. I couldn't bear to watch her wither away.
I try not to remember her like this. Instead I think of visiting her in her room at my aunt's house, eating crackers and fig newtons, watching Matlock and baseball. She liked Paul O' Neil. She always wore little flowered housecoats and swore all the time. She wasn't like a regular grandma, she didn't bake cookies or knit. She smoked even when she was on an oxygen tank, and she had cropped, silky gray hair. She told dirty jokes and gummed cheese doodles instead of putting in her dentures and eating something substantial.
I miss her.
astera at 3:10 p.m.