It’s been over a week since we laid Granny to rest at Macedonia next to a grandfather that none of us grandchildren knew. She outlived him by almost 40 years, time enough to see all her grandchildren born and raised into adulthood and for the beginnings of another generation to creep in. But to me, it was still not enough time. I’ve been grieiving, which I guess is normal enough. Every so often things will feel normal and in an instant something will remind me that she’s no longer waiting for my next visit, that she’s not tending to any of her plants anymore, not even reminding people to water the small row of plants on her window sill in the nursing home. I look around my home and there’s not a room that doesn’t have some reminder of her life even though she never got to come here. Objects of furniture, pictures of her, things she sewed – the material objects that prove my little grandmother once lived and breathed in this world.

A couple of people have commented on her long life (92 years plus a couple of months) and I even note that when I mention my loss to people, I always follow it up with a comment on her long life. And yet, I’m not sad for her. I’m sure wherever she is, she’s happier than she was at the last. I think the only thing that could have saddenned her at all at the end was knowing that we wouldn’t be together anymore. She was, I’m convinced, ready to move on in most respects. No, I’m depressed for me. I’m depressed that we won’t talk again of our lives, our gardens, etc. I won’t get to hear her talk about her childhood and her parents that she loved so deeply. I’m sorry I never knew them. I’m sorry I didn’t write those memories down when they were fresh on my mind. I’m sorry that even tho it’s been well over a year since I even got a card with “Love, Granny” scribbled by a shakey hand, that I now know there will never be another letter or card from her. If you ever read a letter from my Granny, she wrote just the way she talked. You heard her when you read it. It was partially her experessive nature and partially that she grew up as the oldest of ten kids in a time in the deep south when education was a luxury she didn’t have very long. She wrote most words phonetically, so you really did read them just the way she would have said them. I think she must have been a little ashamed because every letter apologized for itself at some point. And I loved those letters as much as I loved her. And I could have cared less how she spelled a single word in it. And tho I probably wrote as much if not more than any of the grandkids did, I’m sure I must owe here a thousand letters and I’ll never get to repay that debt now.

Yes, she lived a long and full life. I’m not mourning the death of someone who didn’t get to live out their years. I’m mourning the loss of someone in my life that I cared about. And I don’t see an end in sight right now. I know it’s there, but it’s not around the bend.