I miss you. Death is unfair and while I know you lived a long life, in my mind, it wasn’t long enough. The world had you for eighty years, I only had you for nineteen. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. I wasn’t ready to not have you in my world. I wasn’t ready.

But are we ever?

In so many ways, you were a Mom to me (and to Dizz). Moving in with us when I was twelve and Dizz was nine. Mom was working and you were home with us. It couldn’t have been easy, stepping into that in your seventies, having lost your husband of nearly fifty years, moving to a new home and in with your daughter (and her family), but like all things in your life, you took it in stride.

Being an adult is hard. I’ve wish so many times you were here so I could talk to you. I didn’t always realize how much I needed you in my life for just stuff. When I think back to my teenage years, I wonder what you must’ve thought. You loved me no matter what, but boy, how hard that must have been sometimes! You never judged. You never said a disapproving word.

While I’ve been able to stop thinking about the morning Dad found you, I do wonder about if I had just one more day.

What would I say? What would we do? Would it give me the peace I think it would?

Gramma, I’m sorry. Sorry for all the crap, the heartache, the drama, and the typical teenage cruelness. I wasn’t a mean kid, I know that, but sometimes, having your Gramma live with you and have such an active role in raising you is hard. Your values and ideals were always slightly out of step with the time we were living in, and I didn’t always appreciate your point of view.

As an adult, I see it differently. As a mother, I relate to it instinctually!

‘Gramma,’ I’d ask, ‘am I doing things right with my kid? He seems so confused and misguided. I don’t always know the right thing to say or do and maybe I’ve gone to easy on him. But I can’t suddenly be a hard ass (excuse my language). I love him to bits, maybe too much, will he be okay?’ I’d continue, ‘Let me tell you a little about him…’

‘My son is an amazing boy who both frustrates me and fills me with wonder every day. Mom says he reminds her of Grandpa – his mischievous grin, his humour, and his quick wit. He’s kind, caring, and thoughtful. You’d adore him, I know you would. He’ll be seventeen in a few months time, so much life ahead of him, even if he struggles to see that sometimes. He is so gifted – musically, like you and Grandpa, academically, like his Dad, and his empathy must come from me (which sometimes, hurts him so much, but he will one day see it as a gift). Most days, he doesn’t see these gifts, he gets lost in himself, and I don’t know how to help him. Do I help him, or do I let him find his own way?’

I know she’d listen without judgement, advise me with love and compassion. I also know she’d love my son, as she loved all her grandchildren and the few great grandchildren she had when she passed. With all her heart!

‘Gramma… I’m a little lost these days too. As you know, I just turned fifty and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lost and directionless. I have so many half-built plans but can’t find the motivation to execute them. I just don’t know which way to go some days and struggle to find the right path. Which way do I go?’

Oh, how I wish I could hug her one more time. Spend time sitting on her couch, watching her in her chair, looking out her window. She was blind, but she tried to see. I never stopped to ask her what she saw.

I’m sorry for that Gramma, I don’t know what visions you saw, what your world looked like. I know you saw shadows, ghosted movements. Were they in colour? Did they have shape?

Teenagers are self absorbed. So are adults. We don’t see what is right there and we think something is always going to be there. I knew Gramma was old, but I expected I’d always have her there. That she’d always be there one more day. I certainly didn’t expect to hear Dad call my name that morning, three days after Christmas.

The world stood still.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him call me, from the top of the basement stairs. His voice tight, panic stricken. He adored Gramma. While she was his mother-in-law, she was the closet thing he had to a Mom since his Mom had died when he was fourteen. I didn’t go check on her. I couldn’t. Or maybe I did. I knew she was looking out her window – I knew it was because Grandpa had come to take her to heaven. I’m not even religious, but they were, and I knew he’d come to take her to their kingdom.

I called our doctor’s office because I didn’t know what else to do. I called Mom. How she made it home, I don’t know. The doctor told me what to do, then offered to do it. He realized a nineteen-year-old girl who’d just lost her grandmother, who had listened to his instructions but heard nothing, couldn’t do anything but cry.

Oh Gramma, I was not ready. I know you were tired. I know Grandpa needed you too, but we were not ready!

I wasn’t ready.

Even today, as I am writing this, I need you. I need your warmth. I need your love. I need your kind heart, your gentle ear, your calm nature. Even just to sit with you, one more time, one more day, one more hour. But it would never be enough.

This fall, Mom and I visited Aunty T and her girls. We all got to reminisce about the few times we got together. While her girls didn’t get to know you the same way we did, they had great memories of you and Grandpa. Mom and Aunty T had interesting memories of you. Strict and very different than the very patient woman I knew. But I guess that’s the difference between “Gramma” and “Mom”, when you were with me and Dizz, you got to do all the ‘right’ things because you saw it differently, even if we were making stupid mistakes. In the end, you knew we would turn out okay, because you saw that your own girls all turned out just fine.

Maybe that is the lesson here. Despite all the attempts to steer our children, all the methods we use, all the ways we try to fix what we see as broken, in the end, ‘things’ just have a way of working themselves out. The self-destructive teen ends up going to college, figuring it out, getting their ‘stuff’ together, even if it is at 26 and not eighteen. The idealistic fifteen-year-old who moves out too soon does pull it all off and gets her home, partner, and life all sorted and raises a beautiful, confident, headstrong, firecracker of a daughter who also gets it all together. The son who seems to have it together makes a few missteps but does pull it out in the end too.

Is that the lesson here Gramma? That regardless of what we try to do, the corrections we try to make, that the plan all happens when it is meant to?

Since Gramma died in 1993, I’ve dreamed of her only once. She came into the room and to the TV, she changed the channel (on an old-style TV that still had the dial) and looked at me and said “Oh, how good it is to see.” She floated off into the ether and I knew, and have known since, that she was okay. That everything will always be okay because Gramma could once again see and she’d forever be looking out for us.