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Missing Her
I just found out that my paternal grandmother passed away last night. I know I haven�t updated in almost two weeks and I don�t want this to sound like some sort of plea for sympathy because it�s not. I haven�t had anything to write about lately and now I do. I have some things to sort through. I�ve chosen to sort through them here. To start � I�m a little shell shocked. I�ve spent the last 6 months of my life trying to mentally prepare for the loss of my maternal grandfather who, as you may recall, has been in and out of the hospital in touch & go situations for months now. This came out of left field. It�s one thing when you know your time with someone is limited so you make an effort to treat each time you see a loved one like it may be the last. It�s one thing to have spent days upon days in a sterile hospital room pretending like you weren�t scared to death by the prospect of losing one of the few people in your life who has been both a constant and a positive figure. It�s another thing when on a random (and otherwise practically perfect) day you receive phone calls from family members you don�t normally hear from and learn the news that someone you once loved with all your heart but with whom you�d never quite forgiven for not being what you wanted or maybe needed him/her to be is gone. Gone. The tendency is to glorify the dead. �Oh � she was such a wonderful person!� I�m not going to lie to you and say that she was because when she was living I had a very hard time being in the same room with her for extended periods of time. My paternal grandparents never took a huge interest in my life. They never made much of an effort. I would hear from them, usually, on the obligatory holidays when there would be a card and a check and a sappy little note about how we should get together soon and how much they loved me and then I wouldn�t hear from them again until the next holiday rolled around. I grew to resent that. I grew to resent them. I filed my grandparents into two categories: the good grandparents & the bad grandparents. The truth of the matter is that my dad�s family never felt like family to me. The fact that there�s one less on that side now doesn�t change that at all. For some reason � it�s not stopping my heart from hurting. My hands shook for about 25 minutes after I got the news. I still can�t focus very well on anything which is kind of what this entry is all about. Writing about it at this point is easier than trying to sort through the piles of work that have sat patiently waiting for me on my desk most of the day today. I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what the date is - my eyes swam back and forth across the calendar while I struggled to piece together�year�month�day - so I could file something away for me to do tomorrow,. Assuming I�ll be working tomorrow. I don�t know what�s going on right now because all I have to go on is a mysterious message from an estranged aunt, a slightly more clear message from my dad, and a conversation with my sister that mostly consisted of variations of these words: �I feel so weird about this right now.� I do, by the way, feel so weird about this right now. I hurt and I�m numb at the same time. It�s obviously not that she was such a prominent figure in my life so much as that she was a figure � in my life � always. I�m trying to wrap my brain around the fact that there will never be another birthday card, there will never be her voice on the other end of the phone line � coarse and leathery from years of smoking which she�d given up years before. If I had known � I�d have saved the last message she ever left me. No, not because the voice was so beloved but because it was there, she was there, and she loved me in her own way which, as it turns out, wasn�t the way I really ever needed or wanted her to love me, but a way I counted on just the same. Anyone who knows me knows that I�m not good at saying goodbye. I�ll avoid it as often as I can. There is the fear, always, of never hearing a voice again. Never touching, never seeing , never knowing� I do not fear disappearing myself, but I am terrified by the disappearing of others. I think I�m going to miss her.
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