Dear journal,
I’m sitting with Grandma this evening, her on hospice, me thinking about the last forty-three years of her life and where she was when she was my age. At forty-three, she had just become a grandmother (to me). Her children were grown. Her world had settled into familiar roles and steady rhythms.
My life at forty-three looks nothing like hers did then. I am divorced, childless, a doctor. I have built a life shaped more by education and work than by the family roles that defined hers. The difference is obvious, and yet sitting here with her, it feels strangely beside the point. Our lives did not mirror each other, but they have been held together all the same through family, through love, through a shared life that does not require symmetry to matter.
I keep thinking about roles and how completely they organize a life without ever announcing themselves. She inhabited the role of grandmother in a way that was not performative or occasional, but constant. And I inhabited the role of grandson just as fully. As the son of a teen mom, my relationship with her was never distant or ceremonial. Looking back now, I think she may be the person I have spent the most time with of anyone I know. Not because of any single dramatic event, but because of accumulation. Because of days built on routines and habits layered over years. Especially the years since my grandpa died.
That role lived in the ordinary. At least four phone calls a day. Trips to the store that took longer than they needed to because we were together. The trip the next day to get all the things she "forgot." Braum’s runs that had nothing to do with ice cream because the milk there was just better (they have happy cows). The joy in her voice when she called just to tell me it was going to rain. Cookies and quick breads she made (usually by request) for my students, kids she never met, but cared about anyway because they were connected to me. Through her, the role of grandmother extended outward in ways that never called attention to themselves.
As I sit here now at her her bedside, I am at peace with her dying. I made my peace with that fact long before today, and I have tried to live fully into this time we still have. What I don’t know how to prepare for is what comes after. How to prepare for the absence that forms in the wake of a presence this consistent. Not the dramatic loss, but the quiet disruptions. The moments when my phone doesn’t ring. The errand that no longer has a companion. The weather I notice without anyone to share it with.
What unsettles me is not just missing her, but not knowing how my own role reorganizes without hers. Being her grandson has been a stable part of who I am for as long as I can remember. It has shaped how I show up in the world, how I care for others, how I understand continuity. Losing her means losing the daily confirmation of that identity, and I don’t yet know what takes its place.
I don’t need to understand that tonight. It is enough to notice how strange it feels to imagine a world that no longer includes her in the ways I am used to. For now, acknowledging that strangeness feels like the most honest work I can do. It is the first step in learning how to live in the space she leaves behind.
Always,
Dave