ZELLA

This has been gnawing at my conscience for a couple of days.

My grandpa finally had to be taken to a nursing home after two especially bad nights at home, where he fell twice and went into insulin shock, started hallucinating and had trouble breathing. Once when he fell, the combined effort of my grandma and mom, who had been staying the night, couldn't get him off the floor. They had to call for help. He was adamant about not wanting a hospital bed in their home. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, the one they had just bought to furnish their new apartment. It was ridiculously high off the floor. The two times he fell were getting in and out of it. But he wouldn't hear of anything else.

He obviously needed around the clock medical attention, at least for a few days, so it was decided to take him to a hospice facility. My grandma was completely frazzled and sleepless. She couldn't even make out the labels on the comfort medicines she was supposed to give him. She needed some rest. He needed full-time care. They reluctantly agreed. When my mom went out to look at care facilities, my grandma insisted that she didn't want anything "pissy smelling." That had always been the thing she associated with nursing homes. She was torn between staying with grandpa and going with my mom to look at the facilities. She wanted something "quality." I told her I would stay with grandpa, who was snoring softly in his liftchair, and she could go look. She agreed to that. But then she went directly into their bedroom and crawled under the covers. She just shut down.

He went to a nursing home the next day, and died there that night. The nursing home called my mom at 2:30 a.m. When my stepdad called to tell me, I asked how it had happened, what happened at the end. He said he didn't know, they didn't ask.

Didn't ask?

I told them I wanted to know. My mom asked a nurse on the day shift. She said she hadn't been there, that his chart just noted that he died in his sleep. My mom asked his roommate if he had heard anything during the night, and he told her that he heard my grandpa "call for his wife and then didn't hear anything else."

I was glad my mom thought to ask the roommate. But then she said something astounding: "Of course, I'm not going to tell grandma that. It would just upset her."

I didn't know what to say. I understood my mom's concern. If my grandma knew he was calling for her — this man whom it had been her life's work to serve — and she wasn't there, that she'd feel terrible guilt, that he died alone at a nursing home, that he wanted her and she wasn't there.

I suggested it might make my grandma feel good, too, to know that he had called for her, that he had been thinking of her, even if it was in the context of a need she couldn't answer. But I dropped it there. It wasn't the time to argue with my mom, who was also upset.

But it's been bothering me a lot. I don't know whether to revive the issue or just let it go. My mom knows her mom best, right? She's familiar with the kind of emotional protection she might need right now. And maybe my grandma didn't ask what happened at the end. That's conceivable, knowing her, but it seems unlikely. I personally can't fathom not having any curiosity about how my partner died and what the end was like. It's impossible to know, not being in that situation, but I think it would be something to treasure, that your loved one called for you in the end, even if it increases your inevitable guilt about not being there.

And it would be one thing, I guess, not to volunteer the information, and another thing to lie. I hope they didn't flat out lie to her, if she asked.

Someone could tell my grandma down the road, that he was calling for her in the end, but if they have lied to her, then there's the complication of the lie. Her daughter lied to her.

People try to control emotional outcomes by controlling information. I don't know what to make of this.