Grandma

Grandma left for California today to see her older brother for the last time today.  They were very close in age and like you guys they were co conspirators in all of the trouble they got in when they were young kids.

He is diabetic, who has stopped his dialysis in the last couple of weeks.  He is having cardiac events every day now and prognosis has changed from weeks to days.  Grandma and her sister are racing the clock to get out to see him.  The best hope is that she can look into his eyes and that she can see him looking right back at her.

For all the people you love, you can never tell them how much you love them and be done.  You will always be at least one " I love you" short.  It is supposed to work that way.  Funny how things work, you know if you tell someone to *uck off, you can be completely done and finished with just one (you will never be short one *uck off).   It is always going to be more work to love someone.

So you need to call her in the next couple of days when she gets that brutal heart punch.  And if you ever wonder what to say, it is as simple as saying how deeply sorry for her loss and you offer to help her in any way you can.  The depth of another person's grief is something you will never be able to measure, prevent, or mitigate.  Profound grief is the most personal thing any one person will do and it is something that people come to terms in a way and time that is unique to them.  But when the cloud of grief clears momentarily and they understand that you are there, it makes all the difference in the world.

When people die, it is like cutting a hole in a wooden floor you are standing on.  The hole never goes away, it is always there.  You learn to step around it, it is an absence that you always deal with, every day.  For Grandma, she has a couple of big assed holes in her wood floor (my dad, her parents, and brother).  Calling her does not fix any one hole, but it does for a moment make her stop focusing on them.   

There is nothing so elegant as letting someone know you are thinking of them when the shit is hitting the fan.  You can't control the shit or the fan but you can assist with some of the clean up.

Love Dad