One thing that my grandma taught me was to be curious. She showed me by example to look, ask, and you’re never too old to stop growing.
Since September, I have often missed Grandma, and had a few crying fits. I sometimes have felt like no one will ever love me the way she did. It seemed like even if I screwed up, or made a bad decision, when everyone else was mad at me, she was kind and loved me through it. Grandma never looked at me like I was damaged.
Yet when she left, I felt an emptiness. As if the closeness we had built disappeared with her breath. The emotional and spiritual connection was gone. I tried to think of her and my thoughts were a dark room, I could see nothing. “Where are you?” I would ask to the void. My words fell flat.
In October I went to the East Coast to visit family. This was the first time ever in my life that I have flown or traveled alone. I did things that scared me and I summoned a brave face. I was the most intimated when I drove solo into Washington DC. I drove myself into the city, got turned around in Maryland and eventually found the train station. As I was walking along the streets of DC, I heard an email notification. I checked my phone it was an email from Grandma. An old email from 2017 had somehow attached itself to another email that had just been sent from a teacher of my child. How is that even possible? I smiled while reading the email; feeling the comfort of her words.
March-April 2020 (current day April 13th) I have been curious given the current global pandemic. I often wonder what my Grandma would say. Her patented phrase was “have fun and be careful!” but she was also a worrier and a prayerful person. Near the end of her life, she lost most of her memory and ability to carry out a conversation, but she was still very loving. My Grandma valued prayer, meditation, and reading. She raised three children, and would often offer me stories of her own when I spoke about my three.
In these times of such global hardship, I look for hope.
(unfinished, interrupted blog post, written in 2020 and posted in 2021)
~E
A Charmed Life 