Playlist to my Gma ?

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My Songs To GMa

A Better Son/Daughter-Rilo Kiley
My Friend-Hayley Williams
Secrets-Mary Lambert
Roses/Lotus/Violets/Iris-Hayley Williams
Night Shift- Lucy Dacus
Turn- The Wombats
Fake Happy- Paramore
Leave It Alone-Paramore
Why We Ever-Hayley Williams
26-Paramore
Dead Horse- Hayley Williams

TWCW: my (soon to be 90) Gma has Lewy Body Dementia and is going to pass away soon. It gets real heavy and emotional. There’s also legit Nazis, abuse, threats of violence, trauma, inpatient psychiatric units, cancer, and bears; oh my! (Disclaimer: there are no bears in this story)

TL/DR (at the bottom)

My Gma and I have always been tight. She likes that I call her Gma. I’m her Pretty Lady. I always have been. Growing up, and well into my teens, we wrote letters back and forth. Letters about our shared interests. Secret crushes. Aspirations. My dream of being Hayley Williams from Paramore’s personal ASL Interpreter. How my interpreting program at Northeastern was going. And if we didn’t write, we talked on the phone. And when she couldn’t see anymore, we talked more.

My Gma is a lonely soul. I mean that in the way that she’s always wanted to be left alone. She’s strong as shit. She’s an Austrian Immigrant who fled from her home to the US when she was in her teens. She had her house bombed. She had Nazis line her up with others and threatened by a death squad. This woman had the “opportunity” to shake hands with Hitler himself and WALKED AWAY. She became a DEA agent. She has seen her abusive but well loved husband die of alcoholism. She has seen her last born suffer through brain cancer and die two weeks before he could see his first son born. She has seen some sh*t. We both have in different ways.

She found solace in music and so did I. Her house always smelled like fresh apple strudels and just cooked schnitzel. Classical music drifted from her record player. I was educated in what the Vienesse waltz was and how to move my body gracefully like the dancers in Vienna Philharmonic I watched every year on New Year’s morning when everything felt new and possible. She taught me to foxtrot, too.

She was abusive, too. To her children. In their relationships. She became nasty and spiteful at any slight you might not even have meant. All at once when I was around 12 and my life was a wirlwind (baby brother, hormones, moving across the country from Atlanta to New Jersey ), we stopped seeing her on Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. We never watched the Philharmonic with her again.

We still wrote. That nasty woman I had seen make make the strongest, most bad ass, Colombian immigrant woman I know, my mother, cry again and again never showed me her face. I’ve always been her pretty lady. I always will be.

Two years ago, she started to forget. I graduated from Northeasten in 2018 for ASL Interpreting by the skin of my teeth but not for a lack of trying. I worked part time at Starbucks to make ends meet, and also on campus through Work Study. My family is not wealthy and I needed to make my way through college somehow. My Aunt, my grandma, my Aunt S, and my family helped where they could. In my last year, I worked, I took full time classes, I volunteered, and I interned at Work Community Independence. I got a promotion to Shift Leader at Starbucks. When I graduated, I had a month of exuberance.I did it, somehow I did it. I even met the literal CEO of Starbucks and had the balls to write him a letter! And then I broke. Literally. I had a manic psychotic break and was diagnosed with Bipolar 1.

I ended up in an inpatient psychiatric hospital for a week. It was actually great! I learned awesome things. The big downside? The woman I accidentally asked if she was pregnant my first day because I was out of my mind liked my dress a lot. She liked it so much, she came up close one day and said, “I like your dress. I like it so much I could rip it off of your cold dead body, if you know what I mean.” She then flashed my her palm; a pair of sharp scissors she stole from craft class.

How I got out of that one without screaming, I don’t know. How I got out of it unharmed, I don’t know. But I did. I laughed like it was a funny joke. I played along. We were going to sit and collage some things but I “forgot some supplies from my room.” I passed a Spanish speaking janitor and whispered quietly, “Ella tiene tijeras.” She has scissors. I walked to my room around a corner, down a hallway, and got the attention of a nurse. She has scissors and threatened to kill me with them.

The security guard caught her using them to cut up a magazine. I was safe. She didn’t suspect me. Two days later, the psychatric hospital went into shut down. I heard someone say there was blood. A lot of blood. And then that same woman was carted away on a stretcher passed me with a white hospital sheet covering her from the shoulders down. To this day I don’t know if she’s ok or not. I hope she is. Being out of your mind is scary, and I know she was. We both were. All of us there were.

When I talked to GMa, she was supportive. I was her pretty lady. I was strong. Also, how was college going? Was I enjoying my classes? Which one was my favorite. It took one month of returning to work for me to have another episode again in September. This time, my mom took me home to New Jersey. And to a hospital in New Jersey. Where I cried every night and asked to speak with my mom. Where every night I was told no so I cried more because I didn’t understand where I was.

So they took me, forcibly, kicking and screaming into isolation. A cold dark room with a cold dark mattress on the floor. They held me down, they injected me with sedatives. They got me so f*cked up on Lithium that I stopped crying. I stopped doing anything. I stopped FEELING anything. After a week, my mom threatened to get the press involved if they wouldn’t release me, so they did. They released me to a break up with my partner of six and a half years because he needed “time to figure himself out” in October. He didn’t have time for me.

I went on medical leave for half a year. I grieved. I cut my hair. I stayed in my parents home. The medications made me gain 40 pounds in 3 months. There were stretch marks where there never used to be. I hated what I saw when I looked in the mirror. But Gma was always there for me. Over the years of letter writing, she sent me notebooks. She know I aspired to be a writer one day so they were endless and I LOVED THEM.

I loved one more than the others so naturally I never wrote in it save a few pages. It came with a card. It came with a quote on the cover. It came with a letter and a quote posted in her lovely handwriting. “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It is about learning to dance in the rain.”

She started to get bad and quickly. My parents moved her in with them. At first, it was ok. My mom reformed their relationship. She’s worked in group homes before with individuals with disabilities. She’s also just the most caring being that there is and couldn’t stand to see Hermine suffer. But then the abuse began. It got physical. There was screaming. COVID hit. They isolated, with a woman slowly losing her mind.

When I visited them with my amazing partner now after getting negative COVID tests, I was still her Pretty Lady. She was happy I found someone who has changed my life in all the right ways. She asked about my classes. She told me how much she loved me. I taught her how to call me on her Alexa so we could talk again. She asked Matthew if he knew what his name meant. “It means ‘gift from God’ and you are a gift from God,” she said, “take care of each other. Love each other. Be my Pretty Lady’s ‘Knight In Shining Armor.’ She deserves it.” We cried. We hugged. We said we’d see each other soon.

Understand something about my Gma. She is very smart. She also has never trusted doctors after Germany invaded her homeland. When she goes to a doctor, she knows what to say to get them to let her go. She tricked three into believing she didn’t have dementia. She remembered the three words at the beginning of their conversation three times. My parents couldn’t get guardianship over her.

It took my Aunt, Cousin and their wife bringing her to Maryland, setting up baby monitors, watching her every second of every day, and eventually having to put her in an inpatient unit to get her the care she needs. They were able to get guardianship over her when she was judged unable to care for herself. That’s where she is now. I’m terrified of calling her. I know she wants her alone time and independence back. She wants to be left alone to die. What could I say to her? but today my hypomanic brain came up with some ideas.

I love signing. I love singing. I love both so much I translate songs into ASL. I obsess over songs. I play them over and over and over until I can sing the song to a recorder, hear myself, and not cringe. I made my GMa a playlist of songs I love. They have such meaning to me and to us. I hope she will find comfort in listening to it. She doesn’t have a lot of time left. Her birthday is December 12th.

For her birthday, I’m going to learn to play the guitar and play and sing to her an acoustic set of the playlist. I’m going to make it into a CD. So for the days she feels so lonely and hopeless that she wants to harm herself or others, she can listen and remember her Pretty Lady. She can find comfort in me like I’ve found comfort in her.

You can help me do this, too. It her 90TH BIRTHDAY on December 12. Please write to Hermine Spears. Tell her all of your secrets. Tell her your biggest dreams. Your biggest fears. I will read them to her. I’ll read and read and read until she’s not here to hear me anymore. And even still, when she passes, I will read them on my days of mourning. I know they’re coming and fast.

We can all use some positive vibes right now. Times are tough. Do me this favor. Your good deed of the day is as easy as picking up a card, making one of you want, writing a short Happy Birthday note. Writing a long letter if you feel like it. Buying a stamp. Helping the Post Office. I haven’t set up a P.O. Box yet, but when I do, I’ll make another post. I’ve already made the set list. It’s linked below. If you wanna hear me sing, I’ll post some vids in the comments.

Also, please leave me some dope memes in the comments. I’m hypo manic AF right now and cannot sleep. Thanks for reading this incredibly long post and thanks in advanced for the letters. I know she will love them.

TL/DR: my GMa has very little time left and has dementia. Her mind is going. I want to do something special for her birthday so I’m going to send her a playlist of songs I like and for her birthday, I’m going to learn to play the guitar and get voice lessons to safety socially distance sing for her in real life, hopefully she’ll make it that long. Please write her a letter for her birthday. I will give read her as many as I can until she’s not here to hear them, and even when she’s gone. Also, holy sh*t, please vote.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4W9STZcutIgSGc6crKNHae?si=W0cgv4KCSa-Km7rvH_rYhA

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