Memories of my Nana

When I was in the eight grade my great grandma passed away. She didn't die right away, but slowly. She had suffered from a severe stroke. The part of her brain that was effected caused her to be unable to communicate. She had severe expressive aphasia, which means she couldn't talk. A person that has expressive aphasia knows what they want to say, but can't get the words to come out of their mouth.
My Nana, as I called her, would become very frustrated when we didn't know what she was trying to say. Her therapist taught her to write again, so that she could communicate by writing when she couldn't do so with words. Her writing didn't look like it used to at all. Her once beautifully flowing cursive now looked like the works of an elementary student, who just learned cursive. She couldn’t write long, detailed paragraphs, but short sentence fragments that gave us a hint on what she wanted to say.
It was sad for me to see my grandma in this shape. She was a very independent woman. She was a person that liked to go out and do things all the time. Once she had the stroke she was extremely embarrassed to go out in public. Nana cared a lot, sometimes too much, about what other people thought of her. She didn’t ever want to be a burden on anyone. She had to do everything on her own and by herself.
When she finally got to home it wasn’t long before she was back in the hospital. Three or four months after she got to go home she had to go back to the hospital. My Nana now had the pneumonia. It really sucked that she got through her stroke, but was now battling this. I really thought that once she got home she would remain there.
A week passed by, and my Nana was only getting worse with each day that passed. She was still weak from her stroke, and having the pneumonia only made her weaker. She couldn’t fight any longer and I began to realize that she wouldn’t be with us much longer. Her eyes no longer had the will to live, and she was literally skin and bones.
The night she died my parents went to see her at the hospital. They told me that I needed to go see her, but I wanted to go to a friends instead. When they got home they told me that she looked horrible. This was no shocker, because she had been deteriorating for the past week. I didn’t think much of it; I knew that I would get to go see her tomorrow. Or so I though. That night we got a call the she had died. I will never forgive myself for not going to see her one last time. I felt so selfish because I wanted to go to my friends instead of visiting the only grand parent that has ever been there for me. Now she is gone and there isn’t anything that I can do about it.