My cousin Chris, visited my Gram today while I was out spreading Christmas cheer very loud for all to hear. The nursing staff said she’s been kind of confused the past couple days. She is usually very sharp and will school you with details about the last visit you had with her! I guess yesterday she thought one grandchild was trying to come out as transgender on a zoom call and my Gram kept saying to her nurse later that night, “If that is how they want to be. We can’t stop them.”

 She’s incredible. I think this is part of the end of life process….she is having more periods of confusion and also her “hibernation” times when she is in such a deep sleep you can’t wake her up. We don’t talk about death much in our culture, but as a nurse, I have witnessed it and been present for many deaths. I remember the names of all the patients who died on my unit the years I worked on a Trauma/Transplant step-down floor. This included post-surgical patients, such as the “Whipple patients”, who have stage 4 pancreatic cancer and are at their Hail Mary of a surgery to cure it. Or the liver transplant patients, who get readmitted repeatedly for rejection of the liver that was supposed to save their life. I held their hands; I heard them beg for me to help them die as their family told the physicians to do everything they could to keep them alive. I turned them every two hours to prevent bed sores that caused them such pain with every movement. So as a nurse, death is not a morbid topic, it is one I see daily and one my grandmother sees daily at 106. It is discussed at the dinner table and words are not minced. That is the beauty of the circle of life. A young child is born in a manger and an elder drifts away in their sleep, all in the same night.

I hope you all are tucking each other in tightly tonight. Tomorrow is the big night. Santa is coming to town. You better watch out, you better not pout..