Sometimes, it's just better to let them go

So, let me apologize right now for the rather dramatic turn away from the law that this post is about. But I'm at school, it's late, I'm exhausted and I've got to get this out.

So, ongoing family saga, mom was having some R&R after the hurricane with some friends of hers and left my grandfather with my uncle. She's taken care of him for the past several years and has had pretty much no time off. Well, she's no longer relaxing. She is in my uncle's city with my grandfather at the hospital; and this time he's not looking good. And I have finally reached the rather emotional distressing truth that it's probably better if we all just let him go.

I guess there are some background things to understand here. First, he's 86 years old and he's my hero and always has been. He's done everything in his life that he wanted to do. He worked hard to do that and loved my grandmother fervently for the 60+ years they were married before she succumbed to alzheimer's and died 2 years ago. We all wondered when grandma was sick, if he would be able to outlast her. He was so afraid of her being alone. I mean, she wouldn't have been alone, but he wanted to be the one to try and take care of her. When she died from pneumonia, we were all shocked. She was healthy as a horse until that bout of pneumonia. Contrast with my grandpa, whose first heart attack was about 30 years ago. He's had several heart attacks and bypasses and almost died 7 years ago and got one of those mini defibrillator thingys implanted. The past couple of years, he's had dangerously low blood pressure and made it out each time.

This time is different. He's tired. He doesn't want to survive any more hurricanes. I think after grandma died, he willed himself to live to help be an anchor for my mom who had lost her husband the year before in a tragic accident. But now, I think that he feels like he isn't an anchor in a good sense anymore. He's more frail and needs lots more help. I think he feels like he's a burden and he's ready to go.

When I got the call tonight that he's in the hospital, my first reaction was: please, please let him make it through; please don't let him go. But as the night has passed, I think that I am coming to the same conclusion that I did with my grandmother before she died, it's not fair to keep them with us just because that's what we would like best. He's lived a damned full life and he's ready to rest.

They say things come in threes... I thought with the hurricane thing that it was its own set of three, you know three parts of my family, three houses etc... But maybe that was only one.