Fading

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?

I don't believe carbs are evil and I got my brother and I pastries today... But that isn't what matters.

Sweet jesus, just one strong belief. This prompt came at exactly the wrong and right time. The story that leads up to my explanation is pretty long, so be warned.

Yesterday I took my brother over to mow my 86 year old grandmother's lawn. When we got to the house we went around the back and put her trash cans where she could get at them. Then I went in the house while my brother preped to mow the lawn. I found my grandmother slumped over on the couch and doing what seemed to be sleeping. I shook her trying wake her up. She didn't wake, but she kept twitching and moving on her left side. My grandmother, the woman that had watched over me for nearly all of my twenty years. My grandmother one of the strongest and most inspirational women I've known was stroking. I grabbed my cell phone and tried to dial 9-1-1, at first my fingers couldn't do it. And when I finally got the numbers right my brother was in the house. I kept getting put on hold with 9-1-1. My grandma told me to shh when I said help was on the way. It seemed like it was a forever and a half before the paramedics got there. I had to answer the same stupid medical questions. I felt so goddamn lost. Like there wasn't a thing in the world I could do. I didn't know enough. I was stupid. I started to cry, not blubber and freak out but tears were streaming down my face. When they put my grandma in the streacher they asked if she was always this feisty, apparently she didn't want to go with them. I said yes. They took her out to the waiting ambulance. I asked the paramedic what I should do, I couldn't get a hold of my parents. Shound I go to the hospital? All of those questions. He gave me the answers. It seemed to take forever for the ambulance to leave. My brother and I went home.

I watched my grandmother degraded to the thing she never wanted to be, a vegetable. I watched her wither. By the time my parents saw her she was pretty much gone mentally. This is the last thing my grandmother would have wanted. Through out the last years of her life, as she faded from the woman that took care of me to the frail old lady who needed to be taken care of, she wished that she would just die already so this wouldn't happen. So that she would be stuck inbetween worlds.

I believe my grandmother is dead. I see no use in going to see her in the hospital. Almost every single one of my friends has tried to talk me out of it. Saying what if she wakes up? She wont. It would take a miracle for her to wake up. If she does wake up, well then she sure as hell won't remember me. But for some reason everyone, but three people, believe that I'm going to regret this. I'm going to regret being unable to say goodbye. To me my grandmother might as well have been dead when I found her. Her mind, her spirt, they didn't inhabit her body any more. The fragile connections that keep a soul or what ever in a body were severed. Sure her body is still alive, but to me shes running around like a chicken with her head chopped off. I know it seems cruel and well brash of me to describe my poor grandmother this way. But it is how I feel. I refuse to bend and say go say goodbye to my grandmother.