My life on PNN

Growing older

As I referenced in my last post, things are a little iffy right now with my grandmother's health. I arrived today in Bombay to see her, uncertain whether this is one of the last times I will get to see her ever again. She's still hospitalized, and for the first time in my life, I went to go see someone in the hospital. I've been hospitalized before, but I've never seen someone I care about looking frail and plugged into heart monitors and IV drips. I understand now why that experience is so frightening for so many people, especially for parents who have to see their babies/young children like that.

But it struck me at the same time, that as unpleasant as that experience was, and as much as it has shaken me, it is simultaneously a sign of how much I have grown up. Of how my parents are beginning to see and treat me as an independent adult. I am old enough to be entrusted with answering inquiries from concerned relatives, I am old enough to stay up even after my parents tell me to go back to sleep and find out what exactly is going on (which has never happened before), and I am old enough to go visit my grandmother in the ICU.

It's a bittersweet way to mark a gradual and impending transition to adulthood, but it comes with the territory, I suppose, and that is something I will have to get used to very rapidly.

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Phone calls in the night

As a kid growing up in America, my biggest fear was hearing the phone ring in the middle of the night. It seemed ominous, and the very idea brought with it a sense of foreboding. My grandparents, living thousands of miles away in India, were the cause of my concern - what if something happened to them? In all likelihood, it would result in a phone call in the middle of the night.

Last night, the phone rang at 4 am, but I didn't hear it. It was about my grandmother, who has been rushed to the hospital. Things are tense and touch-and-go right now, and who knows how this latest health scare is going to end, but it made me realize something else.

I've reached the age of 22 (and almost 23) without encountering phone calls in the night, despite my fear. There have been at least two, but I've never heard them, and only one of them was to announce a death, that of my grandfather at the age of 88, five years ago. I am an incredibly lucky and blessed individual that I have grown up knowing all my grandparents, and that at 80+ years, three of them are still with me. I don't know how much longer this will be the case, but I do know that I am very thankful that they have been in my life, and that I've gotten to know them.

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