My Grandma.

"I wanna start it over. I wanna start again. I want a new beginning. One without an end."

"I am free to run, I am free to dance, I am free to live for You, I am free, yes I am free!"

Being a pall-bearer is the most dubious honor of all time.

I struggled with the best way to begin this entry.

The first coherent thought I had yesterday when my eyes peeled open to the chilled darkness of my room at 6:30am:


*Today my grandma is dead.*


Sometimes I remind myself gently, like to a young forgetful child to pick up their toys. Sometimes its a feeling that slaps me across the face when I least expect it. Like a smack on the wrist when you reach for the cookie jar, I think about something I'd like to share with her, and the truth hits me. Other times it feels more like I'm sitting in the corner of my padded white room in the Psych ward, gently rocking back and forth repeating it to myself softly.

But whatever combination and frequency of these I use, nothing but time will set in the reality that she's gone. Only the repeated experience of wanting what I can no longer have, and getting used to thinking of her as a memory to revisit rather than a person to visit, will accustom me to what transpired in a month that felt like one continuous day. Only now am I waking up from the daze of it all, and the hardest part of it is that waking up doesn't make the bad dream go away.

The positive side is that I spent the last five day with 30 members of my immediate-ish family, sleeping and eating around the clock wherever space and food were provided, and scarcely leaving the house. I have friends to support me and a girlfriend who was there with me from beginning to end, and if she wasn't there to get on the train with me as I left South Bend, I would have been a wreck. I have a life that I'm happy to go back to and a graduate program that will more-than distract me from my thoughts. Its an experience I'll never forget, yet one I don't necessarily want to relive.

I have no regrets and yet part of me wishes I had been so much more selfish with her time in those last days she could still talk. But all I can do now is be happy with what I had. Glad that I had moments like this picture on the wall in front of my desk.
More on this whole experience soon- don't want to overwhelm.