Quality of Life

Today's entry isn't about my fitness or my health. This isn't about me at all,  although it is about a woman that has had a huge impact on my life.

Today, I took the day off work. I didn't work out. My main focus was not on eating healthy. Instead, my mom and I took the day to go see my 92-year-old grandmother, who is my only surviving grandparent. She's recently been placed in hospice care and is being given incredible care around the clock to ensure that she is comfortable. She needs assistance for nearly everything.

She is not the grandmother that I knew growing up-- the one that fed us exactly one egg, one piece of bacon and a gulp of pulpy orange juice for breakfast while we listened to Paul Harvey on the radio before my grandfather read the daily devotion from The Daily Bread. She wasn't the same grandma that let me play on the staircase on rainy days with toys from my dad and uncles' childhoods. She wasn't the same grandma that made us chocolate malts after a day of running around chasing barn cats and playing in the timber. She wasn't the same grandma that laid my sister and I across the bathroom vanity to wash our hair in the sink. Today, she was a frail, changed woman.

Her condition now raised questions of her current quality of life. Is she getting real QUALITY of life? It's easy to think that she's not. But as I gave her a manicure this afternoon and talked to her about happier times with my grandpa or of her as a girl while I moisturized her frail, paper-like hands, I began to think differently. This woman has had quite a life.

Born in 1921, she was one of eight children in a Danish family. In 1940, her father had arranged for her to ride to California to see her sister and brother-in-law in a car that was being taken to California to be sold. In the car with her was a young Swedish guy from Stanton, Iowa. While the details of their courtship are a little fuzzy, the Danish girl and the Swedish boy were married in December of 1942.

In 1945, after my grandfather's discharge from the Army, they moved back to southwest Iowa to farm and remained there indefinitely. Those now frail, paper-like hands raised boys, opened and notated in her now well-worn Bible and prayed daily. Those hands managed a household for decades; maintaining a large garden year after year, hanging laundry on the line to dry and whipping up her famous brownies from scratch. Those hands made those chocolate malts that absolutely no malt in the universe can rival, gave hugs and clapped with joy when my siblings and I would sing songs we learned in chapel to her. Those hands wiped tears and held my
hands when I needed her most. To this day, those hands are still strong.
 
My grandparents have left quite a legacy. Seventy years of marriage. Four sons. Eighteen grandchildren. Twenty-two (almost 23) great-grandchildren. When my grandfather passed away last summer, there was time before the funeral that my grandma (who laments to anyone that will listen that she never had any daughters) was shuffled into a Sunday school room in the basement of the church by six of her granddaughters to make sure she looked just right on the day she had to bury her husband. During that time, we laughed, joked, cried and circled around as a family to pray. If that's not a testament to this woman's lasting legacy on her descendants, I don't know what is.

My grandfather has already passed away and my grandmother is 92. Neither will ever read this blog or probably really, fully, grasp the impact they've had on my life. If you know me, you know that I'm immensely proud of my family and how absolutely marvelous each member of it is. Carol and Mary Peterson are a huge part of that. They gave us memories to last forever. They gave us roots. They gave us heritage.

At the end of a person's life, sometimes, you can't take it for what it is at face value. You have to remember (and in some cases learn) how many amazing things they have done in their simple life to appreciate them. And to me, that's true quality of life.