Mothers and daughters

On Christmas day, my maternal grandmother had a large stroke; her 5th at least. She's been in a nursing home for a couple of years now and to be honest, we have all hoped that she will have a quick and painless exit from this situation. She's been a lifelong supporter of voluntary euthanasia and had written a living will, but as we all know, providing someone with the means to choose and enable their own death, is not yet permissable in our society. My grandmother was a strong, firm and mostly difficult and unpleasant woman, who exerted a great deal of influence on both my mother and myself. She was often cruel, and never gave my mother the love she deserved. When my mother was ten and her stepfather was killed in an accident, my grandmother repeatedly declared her intention to "kill herself and take them all with her". It is safe to say that we have never been a close family largely as a result of her behaviour throughout all our lives. But all of this simmering resentment, past horror and unforgiven behaviour pales against the sight of an old woman sitting in a nappy, flopping in her chair, eating mush off a plastic plate with a plastic spoon, who is surrounded only by the demented and lonely inmates of the nursing home. My grandmother has ended up where she least wanted to be. She made her wishes known, her whole life. But all we are allowed to do is to watch her slowly deteriorate - made perhaps worse because it is only physical and not mental - and hope that something, anything, will put her out of her (and us; let's be honest about this) out of our misery. Is this the way we want to see our parents, our grandparents - ourselves?? We choose not to see the forgotten population in nursing homes, but it's there, and it's coming for us.