Homeland Security
Confirmation Hearings Schedule
Prologue to A Homecoming
Friday, it looked like mrs. nemski’s mother, Grandma, had turned a corner and would be home in two weeks. I went to work on Monday content that mrs. nemski was feeling better, a bit more relaxed, worried, yet coming to terms with her mother’s illness. I shot her a quick email to remind her that I had guests coming over on Tuesday night. She thanked me (rather sarcastically) as she said she needed to get cleaning. With Grandma in the hospital, things around the house had begun to fall apart. We really tried to keep up with everything, but between trips to the hospital, making sure we ate, Christmas decorations still up in hopes of celebrating with Grandma, the dog shedding like a mutha-f#$%^er and trying to keep nemski jr. occupied and happy —the house was beginning to look like my old bachelor pad.
At 3 PM on Monday, the wife and I talked, and I discovered that Grandma would be coming home sometime on Wednesday. “Hospice,” mrs. nemski said. The code word had been spoken, it had been spoken before, but we both knew this would be Grandma’s last time home. I asked my wife how she was doing. “Fine, I guess,” she said repeating our eleven year-old’s daily response when asked how school was. Grandma doesn’t like a dirty house, so I joked that it was good that she got an early start cleaning. We laughed.
We still laugh.