The end of a story

My grandma passed away yesterday morning. I am still shocked. I couldn’t even cry on the phone, nothing. Dad, who never ever cries (or so I thought), couldn’t keep out anymore and told me, that evening, in his most surprisingly crying voice, “we lost her”. Grandma had been starting to feel bad the last two days, but no one might have tell the end of this story. She always regained her strength back.

There’s nothing I could have done either, but the shocking turning of the events made me feel a strong sense of incapability and anger. I shouldn’t be in this place, 10.000 km for home, right now, away from grandma. You don’t realize how much you want to be back home until something like this happens. Mom said it’s ok, they don’t expect me to come now. It must be really painful for them, as much as it’s really hurting for me, being so far away and completely useless.

For long hours I couldn’t think about anything else. Rick was more than shocked, he didn’t know what to say. I tried to picture anything else in my mind but my dad crying words “we lost her”. That’s all I could hear – we lost her. Any detail made it worse – at least grandma passed away peacefully, but I still blame the side effects of diabetes and the medication involved. How can a person have a joke and die hours later? Rick lost one of his grandpa in the same way when he was just a kid. His grandma passed away in his sleep after an enjoyable day with all the family, when he told them about planning a three months camping trip he couldn’t wait for. The only trip he got after was, sadly, to the cemetery.

I felt asleep very hard, among tears. Although grandma met Rick before and knew we were happily married, I wish she could have joined us for our “blue wedding”, I wish I could have talked with her more on the phone, I wish I told her I miss her and love her, I wish she could have lived some years more to see her at our weeding in Romania… Wishes that won’t bring her back, though. Wishes that make me ignorant, impotent, weak.

My birthday will come in just four days and my grandma won’t be there to tell me, at least on the phone, happy birthday. It brings more sadness to me that she just died now, shortly before my birthday. Things will never be the same again in these days of June.

Here, in South Africa, the month of June brings winter. As if it knew about my grandma’s story, the weather started to get really bad yesterday, cloudy, windy, cold and the yesterday road back to Pretoria from my in-laws was unusual foggy and rainy at times. Scary enough, last night the wind got crazy – the same particular sound of winter snowy storms, only this time without any snow. There go the blue skies and sunny days…

Grandma told me once that, when my grandpa died, in 1994, he said to her that she will live for as long as the difference between their age, which is of eleven years. He was pretty close. My grandma lived on fifteen years and could have even celebrated her 80th birthday in October, when I even imagined a great party with most of her family and relatives. I hate when things don’t turn out the way they should be.

I’m trying to be positive again. Last days I was feeling a bit better with the possibility of having a nice job in media in short time, as I was told by a recruitment agency. Our company is also doing ok and soon we’ll manufacture the first coffee tables for our clients. But now all I think of is that my grandma is no longer, physically, with us (I spent almost 20 years of my life with her everyday, practically she raised my sister and me) and that one day, my days will be over too, which is frightening. I will never be at peace with death – not ever since my grandpa died fifteen years ago and I realized that all of us will come to end our stories one day. I was eight then.