(no subject)

Today is exactly 6 months since my grandfather died.

I've felt guilty on and off since then, because I don't seem to be taking it as badly or as strongly as the rest of the family. My sisters occasionally have dreams wherein they're speaking with him, my mother is still overwhelmed with grief at times, and I don't feel much of anything about it. I miss him, and I wish that he weren't dead, but I don't have any strong feelings when I think about it. It's as if I burned through all of that when I had my grief-storm right after his funeral.

It's a beautiful day. I think I'm going to honor his memory by taking pictures of the unnoticed beauty that surrounds us all. He always liked my pictures. He was so proud of me.

(no subject)

I got some disturbing news this week. My mother has been in Longview since Tuesday to try to help my grandmother's living situation. As part of this, Mom and my uncle and aunt took Grandma to the neurologist to check on the status and rate of her Alzheimers. HOWEVER, it turns out that the MRI revealed evidence that over the past few years my grandmother has suffered between 50 and 60 small strokes. No single one was enough to incapacitate her, but altogether she has suffered a lot of brain damage. Apparently the pattern of dead brain tissue looks like someone took a melon-baller and just scooped out stuff at random. This goes a long way towards explaining Grandma's behavior and confusion of the past few years, but it's also worrying because her regular doctor never noticed it despite her obviously deteriorating mental state. Mom and her siblings are considering a malpractice suit against Grandma's previous doctors, since according to their own records, they didn't even do the bare minimum to keep Grandma okay. For example, although Grandma has been diagnosed diabetic for well over 10 years and is meticulous about taking her blood sugar levels (which shouldn't be above 100, just so you know), every time she saw her doctor the past 4 years with recorded and consistent blood sugar levels over 125, he just ordered blood tests and then didn't do anything else. I don't know all the details of Grandma's medical history (and quite frankly, I don't want to know), but there is apparently ample evidence of gross medical negligence. What this means is that a large part of my Grandma's current state of mental and physical deterioration could have been prevented had her doctors been paying attention.

I wish that things weren't so complicated.