I think Joe is planning to write a post more appropriate for Nicholas' blog about the trip, but I am going to step out of the parenting blog voice for a few minutes and try to capture a little piece of my relationship with my grandmother and my very mixed emotions at the moment.
That is if I can figure out where to even begin.
I can only really talk about her as my grandmother because as a kid I only really saw people in terms of their role in relation to me. When we were in Louisville for Christmas, however, I took pictures of letters she wrote my grandfather in the 1940s and this past week began to organize the images. I haven't had time to read the letters closely, but based on the paragraphs I've read as they caught my eye, I can see the unique opportunity I have to gain a glimpse of the woman my grandmother was long before she was my grandmother, when she was just a little younger than I am now, going to school at the same university.
Growing up she was always my favorite grandparent. I am only starting to piece together why that was. I think a large part of it was because she made me feel so loved and special. As a kid I had this impression that she thought I could do no wrong. It is a role only a grandparent can have. And even if I couldn't articulate it, I think I knew that the pride in her voice when she introduced me to everyone we met as her namesake wasn't related to honor role lists or awards and that I didn't have to do anything to earn it.
People keep asking me how I'm doing and I don't know how to answer. Mostly I'm fine because her death was not unexpected and I said my goodbyes when I saw her a couple weeks ago. Part of me is happy for her, as odd as that sounds. She has been sick a long time and in some ways trapped by dementia, and I feel like she has been freed. Like she can be fully herself again for the first time in years, no longer restrained by a body that held her back. And sometimes I get really really sad. Just as Grandma has been freed from her body, so my mind has been freed from thinking of her in the present to remembering what she was like as I was growing up. And I realize just how much I have lost. How lucky I was to have had her. But how much emptier my life is to not have her in it anymore.
And since I have now made myself cry, I think it is time to end this reflection and return to a reflection related to Nicholas. Nicholas won't remember Grandma O. but I'm glad they spent some time together. Here is a picture we took last August, on his first trip out to Louisville:
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Grandma and Nicholas were always happy to see each other and had a connection. It is unlikely that either really understood who the other was and they were never able to interact much, but they each instinctively reached for the other and seemed to just know that this was a person who mattered. It baffled and yet deeply touched me on our last trip and those images keep reappearing in my mind.
Thank you, Grandma. For so much more than I can ever articulate.
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