Grandma's Dead

Eight years ago today my grandma died. (I remember the years because the year she died was the year my oldest daughter was born.)

If you all would have known me back in the day, you would have known how close I was to my beloved grandmother. I'm fairly confident in saying that another pair couldn't have been closer than we were. We had t-shirts made up that said "Two of a Kind". We starred in our very own video-recorded talk show called "Day In, Day Out" where we had cooking segments, conducted interviews, talked about the weather. We went out to eat together, almost every Saturday night. We flew to California together for vacation, just the two of us.

When normal teenagers were off smoking weed or kissing each other on their faces, I was hanging out with my grandma. When normal 21-year-olds were off with their boyfriends on New Year's Eve, getting drunk and playing some strange game that I only know of as "Quarters", I was taking my boyfriend to my grandma's house so that we could spend the night with her.

And also doing stuff like this:



And then there was that one glorious summer (2001) when Vern and I were living with my mom (why is it that Vern and I are always living with other people?), and we'd go over to my grandma's house to watch SpyTV, You Don't Know Jack, and the second season of Big Brother. Grandma didn't understand SpyTV, and she REALLY didn't understand Big Brother (so much so that she wouldn't be quiet while we were watching it so we would oftentimes just watch it at my mother's), but she enjoyed Paul Ruebens in You Don't Know Jack. Good times, those were. Good times. (SIDENOTE: Vernon was so excited after one episode of Big Brother, when Hardy won the Head of Household competition over someone from the Chill Town alliance, that he jumped off his seat and started cheering. My mom thought he was so weird.)

Anyway, after she died, I didn't really feel sad about it. I missed her, and I felt sad about missing the times we had together, but I never really felt sad about the fact that she died. It didn't feel like that big of a deal. (She was one day shy of her 85th birthday and she had lived a wonderful life.)

Sometimes I think people are unreasonably afraid of dying, clinging onto their lives like it's all that matters. It doesn't. It's okay to die.

Or, as I tell my children, "It's just your body that dies, the real you lives forever."

Which is what grandma is doing, and that's probably the reason I'm not really sad about it.