Send This One To Your Grandmother

This blog is also posted on Heroes For My Son.

When I was little, my Grandmother used to take me to the library. She's the one who introduced me to all those books. Her and all those librarians.

So here's a new hero that someone sent me over the weekend... Boy, I feel like Casey Kasem doing a long distance dedication. But I used to love those dedications, so...this one goes out to Seth.

From: Seth Moore

My Hero: My grandma

For as long as I've been able to remember (though not my entire life), by grandpa has been restricted to a wheelchair. There was no great accident that made him this way, but rather a rare, incurable disease called attaxia. Attaxia eats away at the region of the brain controlling motor functions, slowly causing the victim to become paralyzed, be incapable of speech, and eventually leads to choking to death.

As of today, he is losing his awareness, though whether that is from the disease or just aging, I'm not sure. He sleeps nearly 20 hours a day, and eats very little. I suppose he is a little more "manageable" now than he used to be, but my grandma has never thought of him in that light.

I am 20 years old. I have never once heard her say a negative comment toward him. She worships him, always praising him for what a wonderful man he is, for his integrity, for how much he loves for her given the limited means he has for expressing it. She considers her task of caring for him to be the greatest calling God could give her.

She prays with him daily. She reads the Bible to him because he is no longer able to hold a book steady or turn the pages. He is always the most lucid with her. He is never a burden.

If all of this were not enough, my aunt has the same disease. While she is obviously younger, it progressed in her much more quickly and at a younger age. Sadly, her husband does not consider caring for her to be the joy that my grandmother finds. After years of emotional abuse and neglect, my aunt finally separated from him to live with my grandparents. Grandma cares for both her husband and her daughter.

It was about a year ago that my grandparents and my aunt moved from their lifelong home an hour from my family to a new home twelve hours north. Another daughter/sister lives up there with her family, and she is an RN. They now live in the best assisted living complex I have ever seen, and life is so much easier. My uncle comes over every morning to sit my grandpa up, strap him to a machine to move him to his wheelchair, help bathe him, dress him, take him to the restroom. But in the end, it all comes back to my grandma and her almost stubborn loyalty to this man.