It's now been little more than a month since I held my grandmother's hand until the very end. A month which has been spent physically recovering from the ordeal of constantly worrying, jumping high every time the phone rang, sleeping light and traveling back and forth between home and the hospital.
I've also spent the past month mentally recovering from all the worrying and trying to come to terms with the fact my grandmother is no longer physically with me.
Her passing has left a huge empty void in my heart and there's so many things I wish I had asked her while I could, but of course, as ever so often you think of things to ask the person when you can no longer ask, things you could have asked at any time before, just by lifting the phone and dialing their number, but never thought of asking until it was too late.
The past couple of weekends has been spent going through things at my grandmother's apartment and preparing to empty it so it can be sold. It's been physically hard on me with the traveling. I could have stayed at home, but I wanted to go... Just so odd being there without my grandmother standing in the door waiting as you come down the small flight of stairs from the elevator, she was always standing there in the door when we came to visit.
A couple of nights ago as I was about to go to sleep, I just looked through some pictures on my phone and came to a picture I took in late May of my hand holding my grandmother's, and then it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks: I can never hold that hand again!
And I cried... I cried a lot for over an hour, in the middle of the night as the sky began to get lighter outside my windows.
I took that picture about two weeks before she passed away, in the evening we thought would be her last as we had been called in to wake. I got to see her three more times before she passed away, the third time being her last hours alive, the way she must have wanted it seeing how she waited until I was there, and waited for another hour or so after my uncle had gone home so she got some time with just her only grandchild who she knew could handle being with her until the end.
On Friday we'll hold the funeral for her, it's taken long to get the funeral exactly the way we want it and believe she would have wanted it due to it being summer time and the Salvation Army Captain holding the funeral service was on vacation until this past weekend. We wanted him specifically as we got very good contact with him and he even visited my grandmother while she was in the hospital, and he was deeply honored to be asked so we waited with the funeral another week so he could be in charge of the memorial service.
It's been a very emotional week this week as the funeral approaches, been breaking into tears more this week alone, than in the previous two months put together. Trying to find strength for the funeral on Friday, I know I will cry a lot, and for a good reason... Lizzie was the best grandmother you can imagine! I feel honored to be her grandchild and call her my grandmother! Even with her only getting 16 years of actively being in my life, it feels like she has always been in my life because of how good contact we had during those years we got. Those first 11.5 years my life, I always knew about her, I just didn't personally know her.
There will always be an empty void in my heart, missing her voice, visits and physical being. But her memory is forever with me and I cherish every one of those memories!
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