In the words of Bender: "I just made myself sad." Thinking about my Grandmother, I realized I've accepted the fact that she'll probably die within a few months. I've known for a while, but just obstructed the thought before it could emerge.

In an email, my aunt Jame mentioned that my uncles John and Larry had gone up to Massachusetts together. That makes four of the five brothers in one place. I didn't have the heart to ask if Eddie was there or not. In the past 15 years, they've only been together twice: a wedding and a funeral.

I know they're deciding what to do with her, what can be done. After her amputation in March, she gave up. She's not even fighting with my dad anymore. The last time I was there, in June, she was asking questions about her newest grandson and admiring my knitting. Now she's hallucinating on the painkillers again, when she's not refusing physical therapy.

I feel sick every time I have to go into one of those places and be cheerful, try to rouse her out of her addled stupor. I resent whoever's fault this is, fully knowing that it's just as much everyone's as no-one's. I sent her letters I'm not even sure she's read, urging, pleading with her to be well. I fed her potato salad, she liked it, but she couldn't remember that she wasn't lifting the spoon herself, holding her napkin like a sandwich and biting it each time she wanted more. She forgot how much she had eaten and made herself sick. I cry all the time, usually uncontrollably, but I just couldn'tlet anyone know.

This is even worse because of who she's always been. A Captain in the Army, thrify, tough, loving, a caretaker, an RN, now she can't even get out of bed. She loved to garden, travel, visit relatives, parks, zoos, museums. She loved to read, hurtling through biographies of early US Presidents, several magazines, and the Boston Globe every day. We used to sit at the dining room table and talk about all the news, or in the kitchen and talk about food. I was able to turn to her in her experience about everything from making the spaghetti sauce come out right to comprehending September 11th (she volunteered after Pearl Harbor) to dealing with the sudden, strange death of my other grandmother.

I'm alternately despondent and enraged. She doesn't deserve to be taken piece by piece, her foot, her mind, her independence, her pride. It's cruel that Elizabeth and Mitchell will never get to know her, that the house we all love is falling apart, that the strain is driving my father and uncle Dave to despise one another. Who can I blame? There's that nebulous group, the comfortably anonymous "doctors," or everyone's enemy "the home," but the anger just falls empty when I raise it. I know that any rage I might have toward God, causality, or the universe can't be resolved even by expressing it, so I've got no help there. I could turn on my father or uncles, or even my Grandmother herself, but I know that's not going to get me what I want: my family back. I don't even get relief from this, yelling into the abyss where I'm sure no-one's listening.

I'm going to bed. Maybe I'll sleep.