Please Leave The Light On...

My grandfather passed away on Monday, and we buried him yesterday. He was 88 years old. Rather than reiterate something I've already typed this morning, I shall post an e-mail to a friend that has most of the facts down.

I'm sorry that I haven't responded for so long, but I have a good reason. My paternal grandfather passed away on Monday, and I spent all day Sunday and early Monday in the hospital. Sunday morning he refused to get out of bed, and so my father had to get the paramedics to help him down the stairs. We took him to urgent care at the clinic he usually goes to for check-ups (my grandfather doesn't have insurance, and, at the time, we didn't think he had something that could not be cured, so we avoided going to the hospital), and the doctor there said he needed to go to the hospital. He was not breathing properly, and was not getting enough oxygen in his system. They put him on oxygen, and he seemed to be improving, so my father and I thought that we could arrange to have oxygen tanks delivered to the house and we could watch him ourselves. The doctor at the clinic understood our situation and arranged everything. But when we tried to get my grandpa in the car, we realized he was much worse than we had anticipated; so we drove him to the hospital ourselves.

It took a while to get a room (apparently if you don't have an ambulance deliver you to a hospital, then there are all kinds of delays), but we got one. The doctors were either unsure of what was wrong with him, or they did not tell us: they said that he had congestive heart failure, but they did not give a reason for his heart giving out. It could have been the lungs, or it could have been something else. They ran all kinds of x-rays and tests, but to no avail. They sedated him and kept him on oxygen. His blood pressure was normal (which was weird, because my grandfather had a history of high blood pressure), so still we thought that he could make it out of it. He had to be taken to the Critical Care Unit where he kind of woke up, but he did not respond to questions. He had just been talking that morning, but since the visit to urgent care, he stopped speaking. Later on, it appeared that he was stable, so we went home (by then my mother and my sister had come to the hospital). At 10:00 pm Sunday night, the hospital called us and said he was doing worse. My and father and I went over and stayed until 3:00 am Monday morning, when it looked like he would improve. We got some sleep, but at 7:00 am the hospital called again--this time the doctor he normally sees was there--and said he was doing much, much worse. He was on morphine and everything, and he could not breath by himself at all. My father and I went again, and soon after my younger sister and mother came, and they took him off the oxygen. He died within an hour and a half.

Since then, there has been a flurry of activity. My younger brother and older sister have come home. We had to make funeral arrangments. I waited with the dead body at the hospital until the mortuary came and picked him up. There have been so many telephone calls and friends coming to visit. We buried him yesterday, and I spent yesterday preparing and attending the funeral. I had to say a few words about my grandfather, who I've only really known for four years (about the time he came to live with us from Pakistan). Of course, there were fond memories of when I was a child and visiting him in Pakistan and he coming to visit us in California, and I tried to convey that, but the eulogy was awkward and broken. I spent the past four days in a weird state, trying to maintain focus and consciousness, exhausted. I will never forget watching him die and the way he looked after he had passed.

For a year and a half before I attended Rutgers, I used to walk with my grandfather in the mornings before I went to work because he had fallen down because of a drop in blood pressure and, while scared of that happening again, he needed exercise. He had always been fairly healthy for someone his age. He had a pace-maker and had suffered two heart attacks in the 1980s, but the only medication he was on was blood pressure medication. About this time last week he was only complaining about feeling tired and weak, and Thursday and Friday he had temporary moments of confusion (he thought Thursday was Friday). He told me that it was nothing serious. But on Saturday it was worse, although he could still get up and walk downstairs. Sunday he just refused, and Monday he was dead. That fast.

So there's shock and sorrow and fear. I would have written to you sooner, but I just couldn't relive the events and maintain enough focus. I couldn't really talk to some of my closest friends on Monday and Tuesday. Plus, I needed to write this down first before speaking. I need to go over it, edit it, and just let the words travel from the innermost recesses of my mind to the tips of my fingers, purifying themselves along the way, saying only the choicest words for the occasion. While I do have a journal, I was still too close to the events to make the entries coherent, and, sadly, I ran out of pages in my journal by Sunday night. I have not had time to buy a new journal, so I've been scrawling the entries on the inside back cover. I'm going today to get a new journal, somehow fitting because a new chapter has started today in more ways than one for me.

(Edited for content and minor errors.)

Muhammad Shahid Ali Kazmi
1920-2009

I'll give anything to bring you back to say good-bye.