Grandpa

Yesterday was Mr.3's and my Mom's birthday so we all met in Provo for a family dinner. The dinner went well, there was lots of joking---Mr.3 and my brother are getting along really well. I just wish that I was able to give more gifts to my Mom and Mr.3 than what I was able to. I do like to spoil them. At the end of dinner my Mom said that she had 2 letters from my Grandpa that she wanted to read to us.

Now, last week, I know that my Grandpa was in the hospital. He was vomiting up black blood and he couldn't get up on his own. He was having a lot of tests done, and I was told that he had a bleeding ulcer. I had secretly thought that there was probably more was happening, but this was last wednesday and I was dealing with my own health stuff at the time. Actually my mom had told the truth to Mr.3 that day and they both decided that Wednesday was probably not the best day for me to handle ALL of the news. And I think that I am ok with that.

Anyway, we are at dinner and my mom starts to read this letter. The second the word cancer is mentioned my brother starts to wail, and I am trying to console him but hoping that he would just shut up so that I could hear the rest of the letter. anyway, about 5 minutes after she was done reading, he stopped crying and asked if he could go to the petstore because he wanted to look at getting a new tank. I think that he cried partly because that is supposed to be the thing to do. He has lost only one person, a family friend, before but never family. And I think that the relationship that I have with my grandfather is much deeper than his. Before my brother came along (9 years difference) I spent a couple weeks every summer with my grandparents, and they have always been very close to me. When Jimmy came along, my parents couldn't afford to send us anymore.

Cancer isn't a surprise with my grandpa. He was dianogsised with prostate cancer 10 years ago and they gave him 25 years at that point...and being 75 at the time, it wasn't really something to worry that much about. What he has been preliminarily diagnosed with is a little more serious. He has inoperable cancer of the pancreas and the liver, plus the bleeding ulcer on a tumor in his esophagas. Either way, with his general health and with the progression of the cancer, any surguries or chemo treatments would not improve the quality or quanitity of his life. I don't think that he would have chemo anyway. My materal grandmother died in my parent's first year of marriage of breast cancer and going through the chemo was very difficult for all to go through. The doctors give him 6 months to a year to live. But he is such a cranky old man that I think if we find something to annoy him he will stay around a lot longer.

I don't have a problem with him dying. You know that it is going to happen. We all have a 100% chance of dying anyway, so you have to learn to accept that. I think what really bothers me is the time limit, because all of a sudden you start thinking of milestones in your life that you want him to be around for. I want him to see me get married, to get my Masters degree, to see my first child. Jimmy wants him to see him graduate from high school. That is an impossible about of milestones to fit into the time frame alloted. I think that it would have been better if he just dropped dead because this pre-emptive grieving is killing me.

What we know for sure (besides that we are waiting for the results of more tests) is that he plans on going on vacation and that he wants to have a big birthday party (his 86th) that we will all be going to in October. Mr.3 and I were planning on some sort of a vacation this fall, this wasn't what we had in mind, but it will have to work.