For the Survivors

When I heard my grandma had finally died, I hung up the phone and just waited. I don't cry very often, so when I started crying a few minutes later, I had to ask myself what it was for. And it wasn't that she had finally died; we were all there at the end, especially Mom, Jules and the nurses, who worked tirelessly to help make Grandma comfortable during her final days, which was a hard, hard job. I'm glad she's finally at peace.

But it wasn't Grandma's death that made me cry; it was remembering her life. She was like a second mother to me. I remember staying at her house on so many school nights, and she'd make steak and baked potatoes for dinner (one of her favorites) and we'd stay up and watch TV and play Boggle. In the morning to get me ready for school, she'd holler "Hey Laelie, time to get u-up Laelie," in a singsong voice. She took me to voice lessons, piano lessons, clarinet lessons, Basque dancing, and was my emergency rides to school-- in a service she called FART, short for Ferron Area Rapid Transit. She was at recitals, games, school plays, all of it.

And it's remembering those things that makes me cry. But I realized that they're not tears of sadness like the usual sadness when someone dies; the pain of being separated from your loved one, to know you'll never see them again. It's not that. The tears are from the nostalgia of remembering my life with Grandma, and what a big difference she made. They're tears of happiness and being blessed to know and love such a great woman who really was a very GRANDmother.

People say death is a part of life; but grief? Grief is a part of love.

What is grief? It's different things for different situations. For the survivor that lost a spouse or a child, someone who was ripped out of our lives and ripped out of this world, it is the pain of attachment. It's a feeling of helplessness, of disorientation, of confusion, of loss. It's the untimeliness and surprise of it all that gets us. But when my Grandma died after being completely immobile for two weeks, almost bedridden before that, and very frail for the last year, it was no shock, so it was easier for me. Maybe that was because I wasn't there for the diaper changing, the late night crying, and the general disarray and pain. But for me the pain was remembering my childhood. It reminds me of the Ben Folds lyrics, "everybody knows, it hurts to grow up..." and it does. But with the pain of change comes laughter and love. And that's exactly what I remember about Grandma-- laughter and love.