Grandma

          It was two weeks before the end of the school year, three weeks before I graduated and became an official adult. That’s when my grandma passed away, it was in her sleep that morning, and the nurse had come to check on her as hospice did when you decided to stay at home instead of in a facility.

          My grandpa hadn’t realized she had passed because she had gotten so much worse over the last week, she was barely breathing and no longer moved, so the nurse had to tell him after checking her pulse. After months of watching his wife slowly slim down and grow weaker with nothing but pain filling her body, he was now left with the relief that she moved on. She was free, unable to feel the bodily pains of old age and watch time pass as she could do nothing but lay there and decay.

          May 16, 2019 changed my life forever, I had never experienced such a loss before. Yes, my paternal grandmother had passed away a few years before but I didn’t know her, she wasn’t there when I learned to walk or said my first words, when I went to get on the bus for my first day of school 13 years in a row, or watch cartoons with us even though her beloved NASCAR was on. My grandma raised me as if I was her own, no thought of the fact she couldn’t walk as well as me or help me with every need that came, she still was there to answer any question, let me crawl into her bed when I was sick and baby me when my mom got too mean.

          My grandma was my second mom, she opened her house to us when we had nowhere to go, not asking any questions and never kicking us out even when we got too much for her at times. My grandma proved to me what true love was, she married my grandpa when she was only 17, unsure if he would come back from the war he was going off to fight, but she stayed and loved him when he came back even more than when he left. I’m not saying their love was perfect, no one’s is, but it is a match few come by. Fifty-seven years, that’s how long they’ve been married, now a days staying married for more than 5 years is a break of the norm, but they did it together.

          As a kid I imagined my grandma living forever, who doesn’t, I imagined she’d be there when I graduated, went to college, had my first boyfriend, had my first heart break, moved into my first house, got my dream job, approved of the man I’d marry, watch the birth of my kids. I thought she’d live forever because I loved her forever, and if love could keep people young she wouldn’t be older than 17.

          My grandma didn’t have an easy life, she constantly was in pain and sick with diseases, I can’t even remember, she’s always been sick. But that didn’t stop her from loving every single one of us, my mom and uncle, me, my sister and cousins, or my grandpa who she loved more than anyone else in the world. As he loved her.

          I don’t know what I believe as a religion, if God’s real and theirs an afterlife that we all go to when we’re done with our physical bodies. But I know that no matter what I believe or don’t believe, she is in a place better than this one, watching over me and making sure we are protected until we meet again one day. No matter how long that one day takes to come.