A A Prayer for Mercy

Today, I received a video call from my mother. I could not answer it, I was alone on the shop floor, my colleague away on her lunch break, and I had not been forewarned that the call would come. I was not prepared well for it.

She was ringing from the hospice, where my grandmother has now been transferred.

I called her back, but it was too late; she had already left, as my Nan was very tired and utterly exhausted from a few minutes of conversation. I asked how she was, and instead of an immediate answer, my mother began to cry. I dreaded what would follow. She almost never cried. She said, Nan is still alive, but barely.

Apparently, she tries to speak, though you can scarcely understand a word. She says a great deal, or attempts to, but you cannot make out what she means. Her eyes are vacant, and only the faintest light remains in them when she looks at you. But even that light is almost gone.

Yesterday, my sister was able to visit her, as she lives only a few hundred kilometres away in Budapest. They called me on video whilst I was in a shop, walking around aimlessly, trying to distract my mind and my racing feelings from the unbearable truth, that I shall never meet her in physical form again.

My grandmother was speaking to us, saying that she was terribly sorry it had come to this, that she had never truly wanted to live for so long, and that now she had created this situation for herself. Knowing there was no way back was breaking her heart.

I am so deeply, devastatingly heartbroken, because she is a wonderful person, a loving grandmother… and I truly understand, why she did not want to live as a shell of the person she once was, and yet she did not deserve to die like this. It is not a fitting end for someone who was good her entire life.

The fact that she cannot speak her thoughts and feelings, not merely because of her declining mind , but because of the tubes hanging from her nose and throat, must be terrifying for her. The utter regret she must feel now, locked within a hospice, staring at four bare walls in her clearer moments, knowing that she never wanted to cling to dear life but actively wished to die, spoke of it constantly, and that now she does not want to leave us: it must be unbearable.

I feel as though I am in checkmate. I do not believe I could withstand the emotional toll of travelling across Europe in my current state of mind, burdened by the desperate urgency to arrive in time, whilst my grandmother is still somewhat aware of herself, before the cancer and the dementia have swallowed her entirely. The knowledge that I am powerless to help her is excruciating.

I feel a fraction more at ease when I consider that she will likely be gone soon. My sister and my mother have told me she speaks mostly in gibberish now, which I hope means she is no longer entirely of this Earth, that perhaps she is conversing with angels, and with her long-lost husband, my grandfather, and all her departed siblings and family members, who left this world long before she stepped upon the same path.

I want only for her to be at peace, and not to suffer. I know she receives morphine, so she is spared physical pain. But emotionally, mentally, it must be dreadful, that her wishes came true and yet she is not dying amongst her loved ones, as she would have deserved. Instead, she dies in a strange place, and alone.

And so I pray now, to whoever it is that people pray to, let her be unaware of her own passing, of her own unravelling. Let her hallucinate. Let her be surrounded by those she loved, if only in her mind, because she deserves every good thing this stupid, miserable life has to give. She deserves all the good in the Universe. I ask only for mercy upon her. She deserves everything, as no one has ever deserved before.