Lots to Say

I've been having a hard time writing about the first thing that comes to my mind nowadays. So I've been away from my blog for quite for a while.

My grandfather (my mother's father, Pepe to me) has been in and out of hospitals for about two months. He had been undergoing chemo treatments for months prior. His immune system was reduced to the point that he contracted serious pneumonia just after he took nearly the entire Dupre clan to dinner for Easter. For over a month, he was in intensive care before being moved to a rehab center, and his lungs just aren't healing.

Ironically, it appears that according to tests Pepe underwent while in ICU, the cancer is gone from his body. Even my Mom was saying before he became recently ill, "You beat this, Dad." Beating one illness and succumbing to another. Ironic is almost too small a word to describe this sequence of events.

Pepe would likely just borrow the phrase he used when Mom and Meme took him to Milford Hospital for the day when they falsely deducted that he was having another heart attack: "This is fucking stupid" (one of the few times I heard him swear).

His prognosis has gone from poor to improving to poor over and over for weeks, which would explain some of the shifting moods in the body of work I wrote for him during NaPoWriMo in April. Mom quotes the doctors and says there's some hope, but that's all she'll say with any certainty.

She told me I shouldn't come home this past weekend, so I didn't. I hope to be there this coming weekend.

One of the things she mentioned to me was that she didn't want me to remember Pepe this way, which made me think of the photo of Mom and Dad below, taken by one of their friends.



My sister gave my Mom and me each a framed copy of that photo for Mother's Day, and later Mom told me she doesn't like it. She says she doesn't want to remember Dad that way, and I can understand, but the photo (which I used for my Spoonful poem for him) reminds me of how he still lived his life to the fullest right until the end. There is so much love between him and my Mom in that photo, and maybe someday, she'll see it in the same light I do.

Even though my last memories of Pepe could be of him in a hospital bed restrained to keep from getting up, hopefully, I'll remember how much of a fighter Pepe was. But then again, I've only seen him a few times. Mom, her sisters, and my Grandmother have been taking shifts since April by his bedside.

And on top of all this, it's nearing my Dad's birthday, the date he would have retired. God, my Mom's been through so much, with no end in sight. I'll definitely be going home next weekend.