Life

So a few months ago, I went out to the rural area with my mom and dad. We were in Section 19 the whole time (which is a little community among the sugar cane fields), working and helping with my parents sewing project.  At the end of the day we went to visit a gogo (grandma) who had lung cancer. Her little hut had just enough room for a mattress and a few pots, but the whole thing looked like it was going to collapse at any moment.

She was sitting outside on her grass mat, her clothes literally hanging on her, people had told us she had been a big lady, but I could hardly believe that now. She saw us and tried to get up. Apparently her chickens had escaped, so she started walking down the road to get them. She was about half way down the road when she got tired and decided just to plop down right there. So a few people came to help her up and brought her back to her grass mat. We gave her some pain pills because she had been to the clinic about 5 times and they could not do anything for her. After we left I could not wait to come back to see her again!

I only had a chance to go back after about a month, and I was not sure I wanted too because of what people had been saying about her condition. So we went to her hut, and what I saw almost made me cry. When I had seen her before, she was skinny, but now.....she was literally skin and bone...nothing more. She was wrapped up in her blanket talking nonsense because the cancer had gotten to her brain. She kept saying hold me, and we all felt really bad because there was nothing we could do. Finally she pointed to the door and said hold me again. We got out that she wanted to go outside, so we got the corners of her blanket and picked her up. When she was outside they set her down and she moaned form the pain it caused her, they had to hold her up because she could not do it by herself.

We learnt from the community that they had had a 3 hour prayer session with her  and they kept saying; "Gogo, why don't you just go, make things right with God and then go." But she kept saying "there are things, there are things". My mom heard this and thought about her family, and found out that they had kicked her out of the house when she was just a teenager, so my mom asked someone to call the family and ask them to come, even if they did not want to, just to come so that she could go in peace.

Well, she died a few weeks ago, and I am so glad she is not in pain anymore, but her family did not come until after she had died. But at leased she is in a better place now.