two years on

Two years on and grandma is still gone. I burst into quick tears on my birthday listening to her voicemail where she sang to me happy birthday to me years ago (I’m so glad I didn’t pick up). Tonight, she kept me company thanks to old recordings of our conversations as I went on a walk, cooked, and ate dinner. I learned (again) that she loved breakfast for dinner, was protective of her dinner friends, and that her favorite decade was “when she married Bob” in her 20s. She told me all the details about one of her fellow residents and “dinner group pals” being mean to another friend with memory issues, a sign that friendship can be forever hard. In the same breath, she laments the “gossips” in the group and continues gossiping with me, past and present. We talk about various people’s health, an endless topic, and she reminds me not to get old. The pandemic looms over our conversations and I’m brought back to a time when I thought I wouldn’t be able to see her die. I notice how much I need to ask her questions to get her to share more and how much fun it is when I get on a topic that she’ll open up about. She always answered and I can only think of one time when she got close to complaining when I was asking her endless personality quiz questions (“How many more are there?”).

Thinking of her feels like a warm glow rather than a sharp ache. I found in my “One line a day” journal that I’ve kept for over three years that I wrote about her death often, wanting her to go quickly and as painlessly as possible. As the years have added up and I can look back as I read old entries, I can see how much she was ready and it finally feels like more of a relief than anything else. In the midst of listening, she randomly tells me about how she feels my granddad near her, her husband:

“It’s funny when I’m sitting here reading, I get real involved with what they are doing (in the book) and then out of the corner of my eye, I see Bob. It’s not his body. It’s the feel of him. And then I say Bob get up… I miss him a lot. I really do.”

I sometimes feel the feel of her. I wear her rings, think up of new questions to ask her, and recently wished so much that my partner could have met her having met her grandparents. There’s so much we didn’t get to discuss but I wouldn’t trade it for her to finally be at rest.