Nana

I just got done working out. I'm obsessed with working out. I just discovered pumping iron. Arnold Schwarzenegger has this quote from his first movie, and I'm paraphrasing, but he says, "pumping iron is better than coming." And for me, this is absolutely not true (although, in some desperate situations, I've found sometimes pissing is better than coming, but that's another story and everyone who's ever been pregnant knows that already) But for some reason, after doing the nautilus circuit here at the university gym using the lowest weights possible because I'm such a pansy, I feel like a bad ass. And my arms look really great in the Cozumel photos--not the lunch lady flabby things they used to be. I've only been doing this 6 weeks! Sometimes I resent the time--I mean, what normal person works out 1-2 hours/day, 6 days/week? But spend a little time in a trauma/surgical ICU and witness what time and neglect do to bodies--you would, too. Not that this will protect you from car accidents, random diseases, pianos falling on your head, etc, but if you do suffer a trauma, you will stack the deck in your favor if you've been taking care of yourself. The people that make it, that crawl back from the endgame, are 1)loved 2)in good shape. So if every minute I spend in a gym saves me five at the end of my life in an ICU, it's money well-spent. No one should have to go through that. No one.
One of the reasons I'm a nurse is because of what I did to my grandmother.
My grandmother was 90 years old. She was in fantastic shape for 90, sharp as a tack, as they say. She wasn't the softest, nicest person on earth--she was pretty catty--a Kappa, rich, funny, with that clenched jaw wasp drawl--like Katherine Hepburn. But she was vital and fun. She had friends from all different age groups ('You have to stack your friends' ages' she said, 'if all your friends are old, they just die off and depress you. It's just like dogs.') She was doing just great, and then started feeling tired all the time. She had had a lifelong heart murmur, which eventually had developed into mitral valve prolapse. They gave her 6 months, however, there was a surgery she could undergo which would take care of the problem.
"I've had a long life, Haley," she told me. "6 months is fine. I'm ready."
"Nana," I told her, "listen, you're strong. You could have ten more years--ten years of weddings and lunches and friends and shopping. Stay with us. Get the surgery."
I talked her into it, and she did, and she died. A terrible, painful death, septic and intubated in an ICU. Her last words were, "You're a lunatic."
Which is just like her, actually.
Everyone was really nice to me about it--my family--but her longtime phillippino maid, Hermes, didn't pull punches.
"I feel like I killed her," I told her at the funeral. We were standing on the sunset cliffs behind her house, looking at Catalina.
"I know--you kind of did. Why did you talk her into it?"
"I thought she was stronger than she was."
"Oh, Haley, I wish you had been smarter about that."
Me too.
It's funny, we both used our inheritance to become nurses.
That's my 1/2 hour.