My grandmother died last week. She got up one morning, made her bed, and sewed a bit on the cloth dolls she was making my niece. Then she laid down for her afternoon nap on the sofa. I imagine the painless explosion in her blood vessels, the pop! as her aneurysm burst. She never woke up.
She has been my mentor, my hero, and my friend all my life, so though I knew that this day was coming, it’s been rough.
I’ve blogged before about how difficult it was to find out that Grandma was dying so soon after my father died. She was hospitalized and diagnosed in November of 2008, only a few months after my dad’s heart attack, and from that point on we’ve been living with a ticking clock in the background.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. That’s no way to live.
So a while back I made the choice to be gentle with myself: to get organized so I wouldn’t have to worry about falling behind at my work, to stay active but rested so that I wouldn’t turn back into the insomniac I was after my dad died. I took the things I have to do every day – write, clean my kitchen, answer my email – and turned them into routines that don’t require a whole lot of thought. And I spent as much time with my grandmother as I could, treasuring each moment because it really could be the last.
All these things have helped so much. I’m all up and down and all over the place emotionally, but even in the midst of a great deal of upheaval – Sir Newton fell seriously ill the day before Grandma died, and it’s been a helluva week – my house is clean, my work is up-to-date, and I’m sleeping fine. Part of it is that it’s just easier when the person you lose is 83, and it happens in just the way they wanted it to. I’m grieving my loss, not hers. My dad died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 58. There was shock as well as grief, and the grief was for his loss as well as mine – he was going to miss so much – and that made things exponentially harder.
And part of it is the power of habit. I don’t have to think to maintain the status quo in my life. I’ve worked very hard to put systems in place so that everyday life just seem to happen automatically, on its own.
So I’ll have more to say in the next few weeks – I’ve done a lot of reflecting on grief over the past year and a half, and I’m doing a lot more now – but I wanted to let you know that the habits are holding. They are doing what I needed them to do.
People keep asking me if I’m okay, and the answer is no. I’m not okay. I’m sad. I’m so very sad. But I’m also dealing, and isn’t that something?
I'm a writer. At the moment I'm working on a science fiction novel. I'm also a feminist academic finishing up my doctoral dissertation on fairy tales and myth in popular culture. I'm ALSO (yup, there's more) an entrepreneur getting ready to launch my own coaching practice. Okay, that's it. For now.
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*hugs*
I know we haven’t connected yet via phone or email, but I thought I would respond to this. I think no matter how inevitable it seems, death is always a surprise. My own grandmother died about a week after yours. In her case, she’d been ill from smoking-related conditions for years. Nonetheless, there was no big warning sign to say that the end was this near.
The structure of life (routines like exercise, sleep, etc.) can feel confining when not much is happening, but I think they hold us upright when things go wrong. They demand that we keep to our priorities and show us how life goes on even if we can’t (at the moment) imagine why. Which is all a convoluted way of saying “Go you!” even in the midst of sadness.
Thanks, Victoria. ::hugs back::
Back at you, hon. More and more I think that routines are the muscle part of life. Most of the time you want to keep them limber and flexible, but sometimes you just want them to be strong enough to get you through. Love you & talk to you Sunday.