A Bus Ride to a Better Place

They say "death is for the living," and on October 27, 2009, I believed it to be true. My grandmother, Maria de Jesus Hernandez, passed away on that day and it's with a heavy heart that I tell you of the journey we went through in the last months of her life.

It was in the summertime around May that we were first informed she was going to die. She had been falling ill frequently and, after many tests, was diagnosed with cancer in her gall bladder. The doctors said she had nine months, give or take, and for a while, I despised them. Not because they were doing anything wrong, but because they couldn't fix her. It was a one-way road and the speed limit varied.

That summer I went to visit her often. I spent about half of it with her, knowing that every second I could be with her was sacred. It took me a while to realize this, though, and now I wish I could have pieced it together sooner.

Then, a few months passed. And school started. I visited her on the weekend. Came home. Studied. Worked. Visited her again. Studied. She got sicker and sicker and rarely got better. It first started getting bad when she had so little energy that she'd get winded just walking across the room.

A couple of weeks later, she started throwing up a lot. The speed limit on her one-way road was starting to pick up. My family took her to the doctors and they said the cancer had spread and was starting to affect her stomach. They put a feeding tube in her and put restrictions on her diet. By "restrictions" I mean: all she could eat was broth and jello and only in small amounts. Eventually, the broth and jello diet had to come to an end as the cancer started to affect her stomach even more. Then all she could have was a sip of water or an ice cube to wet her mouth.

It was September 24th and my birthday was six days away. I was planning on having a party with a few friends that upcoming Sunday...until we got a call. I canceled my party, we packed up, and we left right after school to go see her. She had fallen on my grandpa during the day when he was assisting her to the bathroom. He couldn't get her up and had to call an ambulance. From that day on, she wasn't allowed to leave her bed. We celebrated my birthday at her house, and, for my present, she gave me one of her diamond rings. It's the most precious thing in my room right now. Not because it has real diamonds, it could be a ring pop for all I care, but because it was the last present she gave me.

In October, we started calling daily for updates on her situation. And, every day, it grew worse. By the middle of the month, her memory started to come and go. The cancer was spreading like wildfire. Tumors had become present throughout her insides. My grandpa felt one in her when he was cleaning her one day.

I stopped paying attention to when things started happening after a while. All I remember is that they were all happening really fast. But I do remember every single detail from the last week of her life. On the 21st of October, the cancer started affecting her lungs and she started gasping for air in the middle of the night, so an oxygen mask and machine were sent to her house from the hospital. On the 22nd, she was starting to tremble. Her nerves were being affected.

Then, on the 23rd I went to visit her. It was the first time I had seen her in a while. My mom had been going to visit during the week so we could have weekends at home and could try to live as normal as possible. I'm still scarred by the image of my grandmother when I first walked in to see her. The first thing I noticed was her moaning from the pain. It was horrifying and it took all I had to suppress my tears. Once I got closer, I got a better look. The cancer had spread to her nerves and she was shaking. She could hear us, but couldn't respond.

My younger cousins came to see her that weekend too. When my mom asked her about it the next morning, my grandma didn't remember a thing.

October 25th was the last day I saw my grandmother alive. On the 26th my mom called and said she asked about me. My grandma told my mom to tell me she loves me and to study hard. That was the last time my grandma talked about me. She died the next day around 6:30 pm in my mother's arms with my aunts, uncle and grandpa by her side.

The hardest part was over. My grandmother wasn't in pain anymore. She no longer had a feeding tube. She no longer had to wear diapers because she couldn't leave her bed. She no longer had to have someone bathe her. She no longer had to sit there and watch as her body started shutting down. The funeral was hard. But I was more concerned for my mother than her. I sat and watched and cried as my mother wept over my grandmother's body telling her how beautiful she looked, and I thought about the past and what a friend had said to me before she died. He told me, "she's on a bus to a better place, the seat is just a little uncomfortable." And all I could think about as her coffin was being lowered into the earth was how glad she must be to finally be able to get up from her seat and step off the bus into her better place.