Ready to Leave

by Melanie White

When I was a teenager, my grandmother decided to stop eating. She had been bedfast for a few years and then a stroke paralyzed the left side of her body. The stroke also left her without the ability to speak.

At first people thought that she just couldn't use her right hand to feed herself, but she had been right-handed all of her life. They knew it was a conscious choice when someone else tried to feed her, and she wouldn't open her mouth. She shook her head "no."

The funny thing is that as long as I had known her, she was overweight. So clearly she liked to eat. No, this was her way of telling us that she wanted to die. Unfortunately for her, the family wasn't ready to let her go.

As a result, the decision was made to shove a feeding tube down her throat. But when nobody was looking, she used her good hand to pull it out. So then they tied down her good hand.

When I would go to see her, I would untie her, and she would scratch. I can't even imagine what torture it must be to have an itch that you can't scratch. That must be real torment. Usually, I would bring her soft batch peanut butter cookies and a banana. She would always eat those. Maybe her refusal to eat was just a comment on the crappy food they were feeding her. That's exactly how I felt about the food in the school cafeteria.

While I was there, I would also talk to her and hold her good hand, but when it came time to tie her hand back down to the bed rail, I couldn't do it. I would let the nursing aids know when I was leaving, and I tried to block out of my mind the fact that they would be going back in to tie her.

You know your life is no longer your own when other people make your decisions for you. What kind of life did my grandmother have at the end? Not the one she wanted. Eventually she got her way and passed away, but for far too long she was kept alive against her own wishes--all because others couldn't let her go when she was ready to leave.