In a few months it will be a whole year without my grandma. A year that feels almost unreal, like it hasn't actually happened because she's not here. I also don't think it's really hit me yet. I still forget that she's gone and every time I come home from school I still expect to see her waiting for me. For those 10 seconds that I forget though, it's the best feeling ever. She's still here for just 10 seconds.
My grandma was absolute best person I've ever known. She was so genuinely funny in what she did and just who she was as a person. I heard stories of when my mom and aunt were kids and my aunt wouldn't drink her milk so my grandma poured it on her head. And when my cousins and I were younger she would make jokes and even threaten to sit on us if we were bad (she actually did sit on my cousin Steph a lot). She would make fun of people way too loudly because she actually didn't know how to whisper at all. She also wasn't just my grandma, she was a grandma to all of my friends, my sister's friends, and my cousins' friends. She loved everyone and I truly didn't mind sharing. There was plenty to go around. She was just always smiling, always laughing, and always making everyone around her smile and laugh too.
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I remember the day we found out she was sick. I was out to dinner with my boyfriend's (at the time) family and we were driving home. I got a text from my mom saying my whole family was out for ice cream and might not be home when I got there. I was a little suspicious because it's odd for my grandpa and dad to go out for ice cream at almost 10 o'clock at night, but I didn't think about it too much. Within five minutes I got a text from my best friend saying she just heard about my grandma and was so sorry. So sorry about what? I was really confused. After I replied she answered with "oops sorry I got mixed up and texted the wrong person!" I said I was fine, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was really wrong. By the time I got home my dad and my sister were there to somewhat explain and within an hour my mom and grandpa got home to finish. They said "the doctors have to run more tests, but the think it's probably leukemia." Leukemia. I knew that word. I knew what it was. My uncle has leukemia and he's still here, healthy and alive. Grandma will be fine. That's all that ran through my head that night.
Fast forward to June of 2016 and it was all over. After 10 months of fighting as hard as she could at 80 years old, my grandma was gone. Now, I cried a lot. My grandma was my best friend, my number one supporter in absolutely everything I did. She was always always always there for everything. Every dance recital, every softball game, every graduation, every big moment in my life, my sister's life, and my three cousins' lives. She even stayed up till almost 2 am when she was sick to watch Villanova win the basketball championship just so she could call my cousin Matt after to talk to him about it because he was there watching it. She did it just because she knew it made him happy and that's what made her happy. She was also there for the tiny insignificant moments. She basically lived with me from 2nd grade through my senior year of high school, and although having her and my grandpa around fighting was annoying at times, her being there made it all worth it. Every morning she would wake up with my mom to help make us breakfast, pack our lunches, and make sure we got off to school okay. When my mom had to leave early she would stand by the door and watch us at the bus stop. When we got home from school and it was raining she would be waiting at the bus stop with an umbrella in one hand and the leash of our dog, Bubba, in the other. If it wasn't raining, we usually could enter the house to the sound of the Family Feud or the Chain Reaction theme song. When she was sick I looked forward to coming home to those songs everyday and to always seeing her on the same brown leather chair.
Now she's gone. One of the few people I cherish most in this world is gone. Tell me, how do you replace that? How do you move on when someone who means so much to you is gone forever? This is one of the hardest things. Doing stuff without her, things that she would've loved and knowing that we won't ever get to do any of it with her. She got to watch my oldest cousin get married last April and had the time of her life at the wedding, but she won't ever get to be there to see me, my sister, or my two other cousins do the same. She won't even be there for my little sister's sweet sixteen. Thinking about that is the worst of it all.
If you've read this far through, I want to say that I didn't write this article just to tell my own story. Because as touching or as sad as it may be, it doesn't change anything. Death still happens and will continue to happen to me and to you and to the person standing next to you. It's a part of life that we unfortunately have to deal with. I wrote this article because maybe my story is kind of like someone else's story. Maybe another person can relate to something I've said a tiny little bit, and I can tell them that it doesn't really get better, but time does help. Each day, living without someone you love so much is the most difficult thing in the world, but as the days increase and a month passes, and then a year, it gets just a tiny bit easier to remember them for the love and the for the memories that you had instead of just the heartbreak. Yeah, you'll still cry. There will be days when all you want to do is cry. But you really just have to love each day by doing what you know they would want you to be doing.
I graduated high school just two weeks after my grandma died. It still hurt, I was still in pain, but I did what I thought she would've wanted. I wore her bracelet around my wrist and I smiled. I held onto it every time I felt a tear on my cheek, but kept my smile wide because I knew she was so proud looking down on me, and that as my guardian angel, she would always be right by my side holding my hand.
