my favourite prof wanted a submission from me for his magazine about my grandma. I didn't write one. She died on Friday. I'm doing alright, but I also deal with death right now by going going going. As soon as I stop and let myself think about it, I lose it. I need to be surrounded by people, accomplishing tasks, and right now I've done it all. There's nothing left to do, to distract me from thinking about the years this woman has been in my life, and what this loss means to me and my family. It's quite huge, no matter how long we've anticipated it, due to all her illness.

Anyway. This is what I wrote, on Saturday afternoon. Life is weird.

I didn't want to write anything about my grandma, because thinking about her made me sad. She died really early this morning, I heard my dad (her son) bolt out of the house at 3 am. So I am writing, because she's all I can think about. She has been sick the last five years of my life. Sick sick. Sick as in "this'll be grandma's last Christmas," and "this'll be the last time she sees you in a play." I heard that a lot, but it never was. Well, until today. She was a very tough individual, with a damn strong will to survive.

I think what I would like to write about her mostly, is that she was really cool. She loved the Blue Jays, made hand knit toys, traveled all over, froze little birds that died after flying into her big windows (for a local bird museum. I said cool, not crazy). This is all while she was attached by a tube to an oxygen tank. It didn't stop her from being a dynamic individual. I think I'll never forget the day my eighteen year old friends were visiting the cottage, and I came into the living room to find them all watching Antiques Roadshow and enjoying it.

I watched her deteriorate slowly, I guess. Her memory faded a bit, and she would tell me the same stories over and over. She went to the hospital semi-regularly. She overcame cancer. She overcame all kinds of things. There would be times that our family came from all over Canada, thinking they were saying goodbye, when really it was just a temporary setback. Having her in the hospital was so regular, in fact, that I hardly felt anything when I found out she was back in a hospital bed a few weeks ago. Her death, while sad, has been coming for a long time.

I'm the eldest grandchild. I'll be asked to say something at her funeral this week. What do you say about someone who has lived so long, and had such a neat life (a nurse in Britain during the Second World War, an immigrant to Canada, a family of pilots and traveling...) but who I've only known a few years before her illness? I loved her dearly, yet I've been missing her for awhile. The moral of this ramble? If there is one, it's this: grandmas are important, and deserve to be known. I'm so glad I knew mine.