The Bubby Chronicles, Volume One

Unfortunately, my Bubby passed away two weeks ago. There's a lot I would like to write about her, but it can't all fit in one blog post, so I'm going to break it up into different parts. It may or may not go in any particular order - I haven't decided yet. But here is Volume One of The Bubby Chronicles. Enjoy.

Today I think I'll just get something off my chest about the way Bubby passed away. Some days I'll write about her life, about her sayings, about her musings, about her philosophies, or about her death. Today I'm going to write about the way her illness and death affected her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

One of the most frustrating things to all of us with regard to Bubby's death was not so much the fact that she actually passed away. Of course we all loved her and we were all devastated by her death. But it was her illness and its progression that most hurt everyone to watch. You see, Bubby just didn't get sick. Bubby had kidney stones in 1991 and, aside from that, the last time she'd been in the hospital was when she gave birth to my Aunt Sue. Aunt Sue, much to her own chagrin, is in her 50s.

It may strike you that 50 years without a hospital visit is a long time. That's because it is. Bubby virtually never got sick. She smoked for decades and never developed any smoking related problems. I don't remember her ever having a cold or the flu, or complaining about anything other than her weight and men running the world. It was so long that she didn't have a personal physician.

So when Bubby actually had a serious health crisis last summer, congestive heart failure, it was really scary. But on the other hand, we figured she'd recover. Well, everyone but the doctors she saw figured she'd recover. That's because the doctors saw an 87 year old lady who was weak and frail and had just had congestive heart failure, instead of a woman not even 3/4 of the way through her life, who had only a year earlier danced up a storm at our wedding. She got rocked by this thing, and it was very depressing to watch. Talk about irony - her fantastic health her whole life convinced her she didn't need to waste time visiting doctors, which meant she didn't have a personal physician, which meant that the doctors who were treating her for her condition last summer and onward were strangers, who didn't know that she was really not this frail, weak, nursing home-bound, old lady. Had they fully understood that, fully appreciated that, I think they would have worked much harder to get her back up to speed, to where she was, not just to keep her alive for a few more months.

Well, I think that's all for now. Sorry it's so depressing at the end. Next time I'll try a funny story.