On August 5th, 2019, around 4 in the morning, my Grandmother died. It’s a common story for most people in my generation to talk about their grandparents dying, but I believe mine is a little different.
My parents divorced whenever I was two years old, and I was brought to Grandma’s house to be raised. My first memory of her was when I was a baby: I was lying in a crib, she was standing over me saying things that you says to babies. We were in the master bedroom of her house. She had just given me a bottle of Root Beer, and she was putting me to sleep. During my formative years, she saw that I had everything I needed, and I saw her watch her husband waste away from Parkinson’s disease. She and I fought a lot, and it’s hard to say if we were even friends. I left her house in my early twenties, and left her to herself. I visited often, and every time I saw her another layer of her would be gone. She would become a new person that was easy to forgive, and easy to love. Every time I left her house I dealt with the hard reality that it could be the last time I saw her.
I’ve been dealt the card of death multiple times over the past few years. Each time is different—varying from one extreme to another. This time it was blunt force, delivered by my father over the phone just hours after she had passed. The impact would seem faint, but over these past two weeks I have come to remember grief and all of it’s forms.
These are difficult days.
