July 4th.
My maternal grandparents passed away a little over a decade ago. My grandpa had heart disease complications and passed away swiftly and unexpectedly just after my grandmother was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.* She passed five months after he did. I feel like I’ve been living in a sort of fog ever since and no matter how many therapists I see or how much time I’ve spent in prayer, I can’t seem to put it in my past. I cried every night for years after they left and although I’m coping much better now, the grief is always just beneath the surface.
These weren’t grandparents who sent an annual Christmas card with a check and called on my birthday. They were parents to me, we went through life together. I was raised by my own parents and they are great, I love them both very much, but the love I had for my grandparents was special. Untouchable. There’s a line in Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With The Wind that perfectly captures my sentiment: “When Scarlett was a child, she had confused her mother with the Virgin Mary, and now that she was older she saw no reason for changing her opinion.” To me, they were saints.
My grandpa was an old-fashioned gentleman with a hilarious sense of humor and the most infectious laugh and my grandmother was a beauty with the most easy-going nature and a wild creative streak. They were the best of their generation – The Greatest Generation – and the family glue. Before they passed away, every weekend was spent lazily by their pool in the summer, grilling hot dogs and listening to the Braves game on the radio, catching lightning bugs in the evening while the adults sat on the porch conversing. In the fall, my grandpa used to give me a nickel for every bag of pinecones I could clear up and my grandmother and I would go through old photo albums or make something crafty while everyone else watched football. Thanksgiving through Christmas was something else – Rockwellian almost. And in the Spring their house came to life with all of the beautiful blooming trees on the property.
It wasn’t easy to let that slip away but after they passed, the whole family scattered. I think we were all really hurt and it was just too painful to stay around, hard not to drive down their street and I still find myself starting to dial their number to tell grandmother something funny or interesting. Holidays like today are when I really feel their absence. We would have spent the whole day together, burned by the sun and pruned from the pool, the all-American summer holiday complete with a watermelon carved into the shape of a basket and an evening topped off with lightning bugs and sparklers and listening to tales of their own bygone summers.
I’m still somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, but I’m not part of a family anymore. It kinda sucks.
*When the Surgeon General announced in 1966 that smoking may be bad for your health, my grandmother stopped cold turkey and kept a pack of her Pall Malls without the printed warning in her freezer as a daily reminder to stay away. I threw them away after she died and although I struggle with the temptation myself and succumb from time to time, it breaks my heart that she ever lit up.
The One Year Challenge 