A Funeral Story Part 1

One week ago I was sitting at work when I got a phone call from my grandpa’s friend Virginia. She said my grandpa had collapsed and was being rushed to the hospital. I drove home, threw the worst possible suitcase of clothes possible and hit the road headed for Houston.

My aunt called while I was driving saying that he’d been life flighted to the VA and he was going to get surgery on his brain.  I drove all night with updates in between. My aunt Pam waited until his surgery was over sitting next to some jackass “friend” of the family squaking in her ear all night about money and his estate and what I need to do with everything. Surgery was finally over around 12am and the doctor came out and explained that he’d had some cells that had probably been growing since childhood rupture. They removed the cells causing a hole in the brain and major bleeding and swelling. The doctor then told my aunt that he had a 99.9% chance of waking up. I still had 14 hours to drive with this information swimming around my mind.

5am my phone rang and I was in full panic thinking it was the hospital calling to give me bad news. When I answered it was his neighbor Terry. Let me preface this by telling you a little about his woman. She lives across the street from my grandpa and works at the same place. She claimed to have taken care of him but I never saw it. She like to lie and just be an asshole in general. My grandpa made a second checking account with this womans name on it so she could pay bills for him in an emergency. He put 3k in there and he let her have $500 for bills and there was $2500.00 left in it. She was calling at 5am to tell me that if he makes it through I need to get everything out of his name and I need to put everything in 2 other peoples names. She went on and on talking about how he will be an invalid and all kinds of bullshit.

I finally made it to the hospital at 1:30 on Friday. I met my aunt at the door and she took me up to the sicu. It smelled of death and hand sanitizer. When I got to his bedside he was hooked up to every machine you could think of. I grabbed his hand and instantly I knew he was no longer in his body. It felt dead and artificial. No one else knew expect me that he had a directive on file with his lawyer saying that he didn’t want to be kept on life support. I called the lawyer and had them fax his directive. I couldn’t watch him lay like that when I knew he didn’t want to. We stayed for hours and then the doctor called to talk to me. He told me what the chances were and I told him about his directive. We decided that noon the next day the support would cease.