2-2-09

Day 906 of 365 Again.

This is hard…

I’ve spent the last 906 days documenting my life. As far as I know, longer than anyone on flickr. Given that, you’d assume that I like talking about myself. I really don’t. I just like talking. I’m actually extremely private about things that really matter to me.

That’s why I’ve never really mentioned my grandmother here before.

If you actually know me, or you follow my mother’s photostream, then you may know that my grandmother has been sick for a very long time.

She took a turn for the worst around Thanksgiving and we didn’t think she’d make it through the weekend. She did and got a little better for a little while.

Then she got worse.

She died early this morning.

I’m really not even sure what to say.

At the risk of talking about myself a lot more than I really like to do, I’ll say I don’t deal with death very well. I never have. I don’t even go to funerals. I prefer to deal with things in my own way.

Badly.

When my grandfather died a little over five years ago, I wrote a nice long eulogy about things I remembered about him and what he meant to me. I didn’t particularly mean to or anything like that. I wasn’t really writing to him or to people or anything. I was just writing what was on my mind and getting out things that I needed to get out. I’ve been preparing for today for the last two months, and just kind of figured that I’d basically end up doing the same thing. I loved my grandmother just as much as I loved my grandfather. I figured that maybe that was just the way I deal with grief.

Apparently not.

There’s tons I could say about my grandmother and how she helped raise me. There’s stories I could tell about her sewing clothes for me or taking cruises. Stories I could tell about her being a stubborn old woman with more life in her than a teenager. Stories I could tell about white lightning. Stories I could tell about how she taught a sixteen month old Mav that proper name for a kitten was a "nasty cat" or that the right thing to say when you accidentally dropped something was "Oh Shit!" But none of that really feels like it means anything this time.

I don’t mean to imply that none of that really matters, because it does. It’s just that it doesn’t matter at this point. I guess I’m just a different person now, and so I’m handling it differently. But I am still handling it.

And still badly.

Like I said, I’m don’t write these for my family or my friends. I’m not even writing it for my grandmother. Really, I’m writing it for me.

But I do need to say goodbye. I do need to tell my grandmother that I love her. I need to tell her how much she meant to me and how I’ll never forget anything she’s taught me and how she helped to make me the man I am today.

I really hope she knows that, and I hope that was some sense of peace to her.

When my grandmother thought she was dying a couple months ago, I spoke with her and she told me not to be sad for her. She told me she had a good life and didn’t regret any of it. She told me she loved me and that all she wished for me is that I try to have the best life for myself and Stephanie that I possibly could.

I’m certainly going to try. I promise to never forget to keep trying.

I love you, Gramma.

365 days