I’ve intentionally left the pages blank on my blog for a while. For multiple reasons I’ve found myself lacking the motivation to share, the stories to bring light and the energy to focus. I found myself back in Missouri after a weeklong trip with some of my closest friends and improved my relationship with a couple new friends. This six day vacation would definitely be blog worthy on its own but there was something that occurred upon my first full day that has shaken me to my core. Sunday morning I woke up and checked my phone for email, text, voicemail and facebook. This is my typical routine and before I get out of my bed I have the world at my fingertips. I had something in my inbox on facebook and checked it not having the slightest clue as to what would be there. It was my ex-father’s girlfriend (he is my ex-father because he emancipated me) alerting myself and my sister that our grandmother was in hospice and was not going to make it past the week. First off if you know me, I’m stubborn as hell and don’t like doing anything because someone else tells me. Secondly, I do certainly not want to do something a woman who I don’t know, and definitely don’t respect, tells me to do. But at the same time my grandmother is dying. I knew she had cancer and I had visited her at home a few times before I had left and she had been looking fine. So now I’m faced with the trifecta; visit my dying grandma off of the direction of from some random soulless creature, see my ex-father for the first time since he spent money on a lawyer instead of sending money to me for college and living, and be witness to the effects of old age and stage 3 cancer. I know this is a blog and is for me to go into written detail about what was seen, experienced, etc. but everything escapes me as I’m typing this out because I’ve locked my sadness and hatred away deep down where I hopefully will never find it again. Those moments in that house seeing my grandmother lying there with no ability to speak or move only gasp was my first real experience with death. I truly believed that at any moment her soul was going to leave her body and take her to the place she had spent her whole life preparing for. I believed it because that’s what I wanted. The pain she was going through. The pain my father was going through, could end. My hatred turned to pity, my anger turned to grief and my words failed me. I had no consolation. There was no clever anecdote or prayer that could relieve this woman. She was not my grandmother anymore she was not the woman who spanked me with a wooden spoon or the world’s greatest maker of cookies she was a vessel waiting to be taken away from the pain of the world. I wanted to leave, but I was paralyzed looking into her lifeless eyes waiting for her to send me any sort of signal that she knew I was there and that her favorite grandson was there, not because of the direction of some harlot, but because he remembered the wet kisses and the trips to Hi-Boy after church and that my Sunday School lessons were not in vain and that the prayers she prayed for her Godless grandson were answered in the most miraculous of fashions. I know you are ready to go because Heaven is what you’ve waited your entire life for. So go and blaze a trail for me up there. I'll follow the smell of chocolate chip cookies and diet coke.
“Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains.” -Kahlil Gibran-
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