Saying goodbye

Tonight, I am saying goodbye to my Grandma K. She passed away earlier this evening, around 7:00 PM. This, of course, comes no more than about two weeks after my Grandpa M. passed away. I will be heading back to her little farming town outside of Chicago for her funeral, likely next week when the plans are figured out.



This is a picture of me as a baby, when she and my Grandpa K. came to visit us in my childhood home in Tukwila, WA. They look so young and different than what they became. My Grandma K. outlived Grandpa K. by nearly a quarter of a century, making it to her mid-90s. But, my Grandpa K. passed away in 1986, which was less than 10 years after that photo. The last time I saw him, he was in the hospital for a bypass, and he died a few weeks thereafter after he came home and took a nap from which he never woke. My last memories of him are hooked up to machines and holding a little mug that I bought him with hearts on it and some message like, "I love my grandpa." I remember listening to Gloria Estefan a lot on my Walkman during that trip, since we were always in the car going back and forth to visit him at the hospital. I still regret not going to that funeral, but my parents thought that it would be too difficult for me to experience something like that so young, so they didn't let me go. It was a tough time anyway. My parents had recently divorced and everything was full of turmoil. Everything happens for a reason, and for whatever reason, I wasn't meant to go to his service.

I remember lots of fun times going out to visit them in their sleepy little farming town when I was a kid. We'd go to visit my Great Grandma K. in Ottowa, who lived to 99 before she passed away. We'd go have lunch out at Shabbona Lake. And we'd always go on trips to the various places the family had farmed thoughout their lives, and visited the graveyards to bring flowers to those who went before us. This time those flowers will be for my Grandma K. as well. I'll have to take on the duty of making sure to pick out the right flowers and have the things we need to clean up the graves and make them look pretty again.

When I was younger, I went out to visit my grandma every summer and she was always ecstatic to see me. As a very young girl, she would put me in the basket of her bicycle and we would ride around town, while she showed me off to neighbors - her little granddaughter. We would walk through the forest and collect pinecones and acorns and leaves in the fall. And one winter, we received so much snow there that my dad and I built an igloo out in the backyard. She hummed and sang constantly, and she had such a funny voice. I can't even think of how to describe it, yet I'll always remember how she went about her business while humming and singing along. She always wore these heavy-duty shaping undergarments that just looked so uncomfortable. They weren't quite corsets, but they were close enough. She wore these even up to my last visit, when I meant to tell her that it was OK if she didn't want to wear those things anymore, but then thought better of it since it really was such a part of her and she felt it was important to do things by the book.

She always remembered my birthday and sent me money for the holidays. And she always wrote that she prayed for me every day and thanked God for me in her life. She loved her family fiercely, no matter how ridiculous we all are in our own ways. What are we supposed to do now that she is gone?

As I got older, my visits became less and less frequent, spanning a couple or a few years at a time. She was no longer well enough to travel out our way, so we always went to Chicago to see her.



My last visit to see her was almost two years ago. The picture above is from that visit. L. and I made a trip out to visit her with my dad, and then went on to Detroit to visit L.'s grandparents. At the time, Grandma K. was still living in the house she had shared with my Grandpa K. so many years before. But her health was clearly starting to fail, she was sleeping all the time, and her mind started to go as well. We had a few tense moments in public when things didn't make sense to her. She had already broken her hip several years before that and recovered, but had then fallen again at one point and didn't remember to use her life alert, so she waited until her caretaker came to check in on her later that day. At that point, I talked to my dad and the caretaker, and we decided that she needed to go into an assisted living home so that she would be safer. I had a picture of her getting confused at some point and deciding to go down into the basement to get something, then falling and hurting herself again. She agreed to go to the assisted living home, but not without some discussion and fear. A few weeks after that, she fell in the bathroom in her apartment there and hurt herself, so she had to go to the nursing home thereafter. Every since that, she was never really the same.

Everything I know after that point is second hand. My dad has gone out to see her and take care of her business every two to three months since that time. Sometimes she would be conscious and know who he was, other times she would only sleep and not recognize him. I should have gotten out there at some point to visit her, but I never did. I can make the excuse that it was never a good time to go, and I suppose in some ways that was true, what with last year being so busy with my relatively new job, buying the house, and all of the stuff with the wedding last year, and then my crappy health situation earlier this year. And I figured it was always dubious whether she would recognize her visitors or not, so I could never be sure that it would matter much anyway. But no matter what, I just think that I was a bad granddaughter for not going to visit her regardless of whether she would have known I was there or not. And I actually planned to visit her in July with my dad, because I feared that it wouldn't be much longer until she passed. But, I waited too long and now I'll never have that chance. I hope she understands and can forgive that part of me, since I know that I let both of us down on that one. But I hope that she knew that I really did love her and still do, and will always cherish the memories I have of her.