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fandomcovidmemorial(originally posted this as a comment on the main entry. I fail at reading comprehension! Sorry about that)
My grandma died in September 2020. I hadn't seen her since before March. I'd been thinking about going to visit her at least a few times a month for probably a year or two? I kept putting it off because I was busy enough that I didn't have a full day or two to go see her (she lived an hour away, and staying overnight would've been nice). I deeply regret not making the time. Before the lockdown, we'd see her every month or two when she had a medical appointment near us, or I went down to a town near her for work.
She and I got along really well. I lived with her in 2014 when she broke her elbow and needed someone around to help with basic stuff. We didn't do much together, it felt like. We watched TV, I'd craft (she got me started with crochet, but couldn't any more herself because of arthritis), and sometimes we would get on the internet. Mostly we just existed in tandem.
Food is a love language, especially on my mother's side, and my proudest moment with her is making her something she really liked when her usual medications had messed up her sense of taste (I am fully aware of how specific and strangely applicable that detail is). Roast chicken with thyme, a recipe I saw in a magazine. I went the whole nine yards, pre-searing it in a cast iron pan, everything.
She got sick a week or two before my household was also exposed to covid. We all got sick. These were unrelated incidents. We'd had no contact whatsoever. Due to exposure, I had to drop out of my work with the Census, and was unable to pick it up again before it ended. I'm still kinda mad about that.
But grandma was a worsening background worry I could do nothing about. She wouldn't go to the hospital until my mom and aunts made her, and then she just...kept getting worse. We obviously could not visit her. Post-covid, I didn't have the emotional and mental bandwidth to attend her streamed funeral. What day and time was it? I couldn't tell you then or now. I vaguely regret this, but would that experience at that time have helped anything? I don't know.
I got to see her gravestone recently (apparently she died on my older sister's birthday? I felt like I should have known that somehow). We visited her mostly-empty house that we went to every week growing up, until I went to college, for Sunday dinner.
I showed my 8-year-old nephew around, and helped my 1-year-old niece learn how to climb the steps, my hands in hers, and thought about how bittersweet it was that they will never really know their great-grandma except in the way we talk about her. The same way I know about my great-great grandmother. I'm apparently a lot like her. Too blunt, sometimes funny, and sturdy, as bodies go.
My mother is selling the house, thankfully to someone we know, and that I think will treat it well. I got a few of my grandmother's possessions. I feel like that is all I have, beyond memories and a photo or two on my phone. I do see her in my niece, every now and then. The way her hair curls around her head, the way she sits in a chair. Maybe it's wishful thinking.
I don't believe in an afterlife, personally, but I hope she went to the one she wanted. I miss her. I miss making diverted plans to go see her. I miss the potential memories she could have shared with me, if I had only asked the right way. I miss having a world with her in it.
My grandma died in September 2020. I hadn't seen her since before March. I'd been thinking about going to visit her at least a few times a month for probably a year or two? I kept putting it off because I was busy enough that I didn't have a full day or two to go see her (she lived an hour away, and staying overnight would've been nice). I deeply regret not making the time. Before the lockdown, we'd see her every month or two when she had a medical appointment near us, or I went down to a town near her for work.
She and I got along really well. I lived with her in 2014 when she broke her elbow and needed someone around to help with basic stuff. We didn't do much together, it felt like. We watched TV, I'd craft (she got me started with crochet, but couldn't any more herself because of arthritis), and sometimes we would get on the internet. Mostly we just existed in tandem.
Food is a love language, especially on my mother's side, and my proudest moment with her is making her something she really liked when her usual medications had messed up her sense of taste (I am fully aware of how specific and strangely applicable that detail is). Roast chicken with thyme, a recipe I saw in a magazine. I went the whole nine yards, pre-searing it in a cast iron pan, everything.
She got sick a week or two before my household was also exposed to covid. We all got sick. These were unrelated incidents. We'd had no contact whatsoever. Due to exposure, I had to drop out of my work with the Census, and was unable to pick it up again before it ended. I'm still kinda mad about that.
But grandma was a worsening background worry I could do nothing about. She wouldn't go to the hospital until my mom and aunts made her, and then she just...kept getting worse. We obviously could not visit her. Post-covid, I didn't have the emotional and mental bandwidth to attend her streamed funeral. What day and time was it? I couldn't tell you then or now. I vaguely regret this, but would that experience at that time have helped anything? I don't know.
I got to see her gravestone recently (apparently she died on my older sister's birthday? I felt like I should have known that somehow). We visited her mostly-empty house that we went to every week growing up, until I went to college, for Sunday dinner.
I showed my 8-year-old nephew around, and helped my 1-year-old niece learn how to climb the steps, my hands in hers, and thought about how bittersweet it was that they will never really know their great-grandma except in the way we talk about her. The same way I know about my great-great grandmother. I'm apparently a lot like her. Too blunt, sometimes funny, and sturdy, as bodies go.
My mother is selling the house, thankfully to someone we know, and that I think will treat it well. I got a few of my grandmother's possessions. I feel like that is all I have, beyond memories and a photo or two on my phone. I do see her in my niece, every now and then. The way her hair curls around her head, the way she sits in a chair. Maybe it's wishful thinking.
I don't believe in an afterlife, personally, but I hope she went to the one she wanted. I miss her. I miss making diverted plans to go see her. I miss the potential memories she could have shared with me, if I had only asked the right way. I miss having a world with her in it.
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Date: 4 Mar 2021 13:18 (UTC)no subject
Date: 5 Mar 2021 16:09 (UTC)