Dear Friends,
I want to tell you about this photo.
In the photo, I am holding a birthday present from my grandma. My grandma always gave me the best presents. This birthday it was the most perfect porcelain doll. The doll jacket had intricate gold embroidery (our favorite color). The thick wrapping paper featured a blizzard of metallic snowflakes (something I knew my mom would never splurge on). My grandma just understood. My mom liked the simple things. But me and my grandma? We were fans of the fancy things.
I am smug as a bug in the picture above. I'm next to my grandma, holding the doll still in its box, and I'm beaming. My grandma is in a wheelchair because she had two strokes.
After the first stroke, my mom switched her major in college to physical therapy to learn how to help. My grandmother rehabilitated and was able to walk again, albeit a bit slower, with a limp. She was even able to move in with my parents when I was born to help take care of me. I heard many stories of the indulgent breakfasts she'd make me, accommodating my toddler whims, and the early morning park trips. After my grandma's first stroke, she went to Apple Hill and hiked down the hill in the snow with me. She went white water rafting and rode a three-wheeler bike for exercise. Once my mom got into the swing of being a new mom, my grandma moved back to San Francisco. Before her second stroke, whenever we came and visited, she'd have new toys waiting on the guest bed. My mom told me, that's the kind of person my grandma was.
One day, as an adult, I took my own family to visit my parents' house. I stopped to point the picture on the wall out to my husband. "That's my grandma, who would buy me all....." For the first time, I realized it was my mom who had carefully picked out and presented each of these dolls "from my grandmother". My mom had rebuilt the world my grandma would have made for us.
As a child, even after my grandma's second stroke, I always thought my grandma knew what I felt. She could still smile at us, and her mumbles and slurred speech had what sounded to a kid like obvious intonations, even when she'd get mixed up and start only speaking to us in Chamorro. So it wasn't that far off for me to think she would know what I would like as a present. After all, she had given us so many before the stroke.
But it was my mom had made a choice to embody and carry on the spirit of my grandmother. My mom had shouldered not only the very physical work required to care for a stroke patient, but the invisible weight of embodying my grandma, and being my grandma's hands and heart, while my grandma was still living.
The second stroke wasn't the same. Her caretaker at the time did not properly recognize the stroke when it happened, and my grandma experienced delayed care. She was fully paralyzed for the rest of her life although her brain function was intact. My mom had just had her third child, but moved her parents from the city she had grown up in and that they had made a life into a neighborhood close to us. She took care of both my grandparents, including my grandpa, who had a heart attack. This is the time period where I, ignorantly, indulged in gifts from my grandma.
After my grandma's second stroke, Western doctors told my family my grandma might have a few years to live, if she was lucky. Eventually family made the decision to move her and my grandpa to Guam where they could be with more family and where the culture around familial care is different. She lived 20 more years. For more than 20 years, her body was dead except for the use of her right arm.
My mom sometimes said she'd wondered what it would have been like if the person who was with my grandma when she had her second stroke had been able to recognize what was happening. She wished I had known her mama the way she did.
My mom put this photo in the guest room where her granddaughters stay when they visit. I remember my grandma when I see that photo, but I also think of my own mom. That was her momma. My mom is now a grandmother to her granddaughters, the way my grandmother would have been if she could have.
It's time to unite, take action, and save lives. Every dollar donated, means more people trained in lifesaving responses, more research and more lifesaving moments for everyone. Together, we can turn bystanders into lifesavers.? The readiness, and education of our community can be the difference between life and death. ?
I Walk to Save Lives. Help me reach my goal today.?
