Grandma Honey

Good evening all.

In talking to my cousin Audra I received a very poignant message. She said, "That's the thing about life. No one gets out alive". It's a saying I had not heard before, but it's so true.

My father's mother, my grandma Janet "Honey" Thomas, is entering the last chapter in her Earthly life. Without a doubt it is a miracle of modern medicine that she has lived this long at all. At the age of 79 she has survived far longer than anyone thought she could. She was the first woman in the state of Iowa to undergo a quintuple bypass operation. She had her abdominal aorta virtually taken apart inch by inch, cleaned out, and sewn back together, and those were just the big surgeries. She went through seemingly endless angiograms, cardioversions, IV therapies, etc. etc. etc. After each one the doctors would gather the family around and voice his estimations for how much more time this latest procedure "bought" her. In 1979 she was told 5-10 years.

As her health gradually started to decline in recent years we again started to hear that her luck may have finally run out, and that our time with her was truly limited. But like a Phoenix she would defy the experts educated guesses and return to a more stable state of health. In the summer of 2007 after a morning procedure to return her heart back to a normal rhythm she rapidly decompensated and required emergency hospitalization where she was placed on a ventilator and showed what we all, including the neurologist, saw as signs of heavy brain damage. She was in a medically induced coma and we all thought she was slipping away from us. That night the neurologist told our family that the next morning he would stop her IV medications and that she would most likely pass away shortly thereafter. My father called my uncle in New York and he booked the earliest flight he could get to Iowa. On the way to the airport the next morning my father considered that by the time he picked up his brother and returned to the hospital their mother might already be gone. We were heartbroken. The image of my grandfather gripping the foot of her bed with white knuckles, crying that he wasn't ready to let her go, will stay with me forever.

But the doctors were wrong again, and Honey's will to live overcame. They discontinued her meds, and after a short time she was extubated. By that evening she was sitting up in bed watching TV, talking, and eating her dinner tray. Again, she escaped the grasps of death. Since that incident we knew her options with regards to further medical treatments were growing more and more limited. Still she seemed to chug right along.

2011 has not been a good year for Honey. She began requiring hospitalizations in January for kidney problems. Testing revealed a blockage in her kidney and after proper fluid resuscitation doctors placed a stent in her kidney to help it return to normal function. However, positive effects were short lived. A pattern began to emerge where about every two weeks she would need to return to the hospital for either renal or cardiac issues (or both). It began to look more like her body was finally yielding to the fighting it was engaged in for the past 30 years. As of yesterday we, as a family, learned that there is nothing more medicine can do for her. She is in renal failure. She is suffering from the effects of Congestive Heart Failure. They cannot alleviate the symptoms of one without increasing the problems of the other. The decision has been made for her to receive hospice care, and live out the remainder of her life as comfortable as possible. Hopefully this will be done in the comfort of her own home where she longs to be.

It is so hard to sum up my life with Honey. Whenever I begin to reminisce about a particular memory I find my mind flooded with the images of three more. For starters, I was more than a few years old before I had any idea that her name wasn't really Honey. My older brother and I were the only grandchildren for 6 years and we enjoyed her undivided attention. It was another 6 years after the birth of our younger brother that we had any cousins on my father's side of the family, and living close to our grandparents provided us with ample time to be spoiled rotten by our Grandpa and Honey. I remember a shirt she wore that had a small jar of honey in the area of the breast pocket with the word HONEY written below it, at my young age I assumed she was wearing shirts with her name on them.

Honey always greets my the same way. She flings her arms wide open and with a gigantic smile on her face and exclaims "Katy Darlin'!" That is one of two nicknames she had for me, with the other being Miss Moffett. I love hearing her call me either, it makes me feel so special and so loved.

Honey and I are always cold. While the rest of our family would be sweltering away in shorts and t-shirts, Honey and I were wearing jeans and had our hooded sweatshirts on. The two of us were always checking with each other that we had the proper warm clothing on to go into most restaurants. After swimming in Lake Okoboji I would finally shiver my way out of the water with blue lips, feet, and hands, and Honey would wrap me up like a sausage in a gigantic Hawaii beach towel. I will always remember all of us on the beach lathered in sunscreen and down to our swimsuits while Honey sat in a beach chair covered head to toe, usually with a beach towel around herself for extra warmth. Obviously later in her life her inability to stay warm was a direct result of her declining health. She has always been incredibly tiny, and as the weight began to fall off, her body lost its way to keep herself warm.

My Grandpa and I loved to get up before dawn and head out fishing. No matter how early we rose Honey got up to in order to prepare our breakfast and pack some snacks to have in the boat. Grandpa had a thermos of coffee, and I had one of perfectly mixed hot chocolate. Grandpa had toast with butter, and I had "half and half" toast with butter on one half, peanut butter one the other half. It's certainly not extravagant, but I thought it was fantastic and it meant so much to me that she was always willing to make it. She kept our cabin refrigerator full of frozen mini Snickers, Milky Way bars, Fudgecicles, and hot dogs, and the cupboards always had Little Debbie Bars. Growing up I always thought that was because she wanted her grandkids to have good junk food at the cabin, but I learned she was an unrepentant chocoholic/hot dog addict. And good for her, we should all have such tasty vices!

Our little cabin in Okoboji has a notorious sink. I know that might sounds completely bizarre, but believe me when I say that thing is posessed. Grandpa and I would spend all morning out on the lake trying to catch whatever we could. We would leave markers where we had bites and move around to various bays chatting the day away until we saw Honey sitting on the bench of the end of the dock signaling that it was time to tie up and return for lunch. Grandpa never was one to bait the hook of a grandchild who was pefectly capable of doing it herself, so my fingernails were packed with dirt and worm guts and my hands stunk of the slimiest bluegills and bullhead Okoboji had to offer. She would help me out of the boat and recoil in horror at the sight, and probably smell, of my hands.
    
     "Ick! You get on up there and wash those hands, twice, with hot soapy water. And remember to hold your arms out when you pull the drain plug!" 

An odd statement to an outsider for sure. But the sound that drain made as it emptied the basin was mind-blowing, and no one in that cabin doubted for a second that it would suck small children down if given the chance. So I would scrub as much as I could, pull the plug, and dutifully hold my arms out to my sides. Then she would check my work by asking to see my hands and asking if they still smelled like fish. After I passed inspection it was chow time, but Honey certainly was not going to allow a little girl with disgusting hands to eat at the lunch table. Oddly enough this is the same woman who, when I would dip my binky in the sand, would wash it off in the lake and plunk it back in my mouth. I tried telling her I rinsed my hands off in the lake after baiting the hook and releasing a fish, but that wasn't cutting it when it came to eating.

Honey was also a devoted sun-worshiper, and she had a serious unfair advantage considering her natural dark complexion that left her looking completely bronzed even in the dead of an Iowa winter. She and grandpa loved taking trips to various tropical vacations including Puerta Vallarta and Hawaii. I understand she would sit on the beach in Hawaii and chow down on hot dogs, always keeping it classy. She never even tried to pretend that she had anything less than a robust love affair with hot dogs.

Honey makes the most amazing chicken noodle soup, beef and barley soup, fruit salad, and sugar cookies on the planet, hands down, according to everyone in our family. Naturally we the people want to replicate these items. However, obtaining an accurate recipe is completely impossible. Occasionally we come across a recipe card in her handwriting and think we've hit the culinary jackpot. Wrong. What makes her cooking so amazing is the personal tweaks she has made. She'll readily admit to tweaking the recipe, but when asked what exactly she does to change it she gets very vague and starts throwing around words like smidgen and scant. What in the world is a scant amount of butter? Honestly, it's another personality quirk that we used to find slightly aggravating, but in the last several years it just gives us a pause to light-heartedly roll our eyes and chuckle about "This one's a grandma Honey recipe".

Of course a lifetime cannot be summed up in a single blog posting, but I wanted to write something down quickly and this is what jumbled out onto the page. I'm sure more will be added later, but for tonight I wanted something to make the hurt a little less.

Katy