August 24th, 2009

It was a Monday. My second to last day of summer. I was about to be a senior in high school. I was sick. I had a fever. One of those miserable summer colds that find you lying in bed sweating and thinking about death. But today I had one more reason to think about death. My grandma died two years ago today.

She had been battling cancer for something like seven years. That's a long time to be diagnosed with melanoma. At 75 she lay in bed on August 24th letting her last grip on life slip away. And I lay in bed an hour southeast with my life firmly in tact, all things considered.

It was both a surprise and not a surprise. I remember knowing I was not going to say goodbye. There was no chance that she would survive the week but for some reason it made sense not to let the sick, contagious, only grandchild into the room of a dying woman. I remember my mom telling me that my grandmother had said she didn't want me to visit her anyway. She didn't want me seeing her in the state she was in. Didn't want to see her weak. I never saw my grandmother weak, and she wasn't about to let me start now.

She wanted me to remember her as she was up until those last two weeks. She didn't want my last memory of her to be her in bed waiting to close her eyes for the last time.

My last memory of her was standing outside her house with my dad and a few other people explaining the upcoming months. It was during the infamous summer party I have already mentioned in a previous post. The white of one of her eyes had turned dark red, the cancer was spreading and had effected her eye. It was a sudden development and shocking. It had spread and wasn't stopping. Was it in her liver now? The doctors were worried that she only had a few months left.

A few months turned into one month, with her dying Monday, August 24th, 2009.

My grandmother was never supposed to die. If anyone coulda beat death it was gunna be her. She had the life force, as Eddie Izzard would say.

Contemplating death isn't something I am wont to do. I don't like dwelling on the topic. I know very little about death other than it happens universally. The cause matters little to me. Whether it's struggling with cancer for almost half of your granddaughters life, or it's being ushered out of life quickly, it hurts.

It hurts to the core. I'm not sure there is such a thing as a painless death. Nothing good ends unless it ends badly. Life is good. Life is beautiful. And the end of life hurts. You can't whisk the issue under the door.

There is a Bible quote about how you never know when you'll die. If I cared enough about the Bible or the quote, I would look it up. If you're that interested you should look it up. You could live until you are 101 or you could die when you are 27 (along with some other very famous people )

Some people call death the equalizer. Everyone dies. It is the only fair thing about life. I disagree. It's not fair that a mother diagnosed with breast cancer cannot watch her child graduate high school. It's not fair a father hit by a drunk driver won't walk his daughter down the aisle for her wedding. Death is not fair.

My grandmother didn't see me graduate high school. She won't see me graduate college. She won't see me get married. She won't see my children grow up. She won't get to see the woman I have become just in the last two years that she's been gone.

Maybe my grandma will always be watching me-- up until I become a grandmother myself. Maybe she has seen me grow up these two years. Maybe she's reading this from heaven shaking her head about all the fuss. I know she would hate all the fuss. The best I can do is live my life like she is still here. Like she is still watching me.