Come on, January 2008…. for real!?!?!?!?

So, no lie, the day after I post my last blog, Daddy calls me about my grandmother.  She’s been in and out of the hospital since The Wedding and on Monday the doctors finally diagnosed her. She has bone cancer and they’ve given her six months to live. When I hear this… I just have no idea what to think or how to feel.

Now, mind you, The Siblings and I never had a good relationship with my Grandmother.  I mean, she came to town every year and always stayed on the other side of town with my Dad’s sister and her three sons.  She always lavished so much attention (and gifts) upon them.  They spent weeks during the summer at her home in Arkansas.  For us?  We may as well not have existed, which sucked, especially considering the fact that my maternal Grandmother died 3 months before my big brother was born, so we pretty much never got to know her.

Anyway, I digress.  Over the past couple years the relationship has improved… slightly; but not to the point where the thought of her not around shakes me to my core.  I don’t want to sound like I’m disrespecting her, because I’m not.  I love my Grandmother.  The point I’m trying to make is that I feel that there will be some pressure to be more broken up about this news (and the coming passing), than I may show in the end.  When I learned back in September that a woman from my Church that I knew and loved dearly had passed away from Breast Cancer after a couple years of a tough struggle, I was speechless and at the viewing and funeral I cried.  I just don’t know if I will react the same way about my close blood relative.

In any case, I’m there for my Dad.  I’m there for my Grandmother (who has not been told yet, btw.  That will happen this week).  I’m there for my family.  The Sibs and I visited her tonight at my Aunt’s house… (they’re not going to send her back to Arkansas because 4 of her 7 children live here in the Bay Area and she was already out here anyway) She looked like the same grandmother.  We didn’t breathe a word about her diagnosis.  We made conversation and enjoyed the time.

I have absolutely no idea of how hard the coming months will be for her and for my family.

The only thing remotely close that I can relate to is that nine years ago my Great Aunt (Big Sis to my maternal Grandmother) succumbed to ALS after battling it for several years.  She was the only real Grandmother figure I had growing up and I watched her condition slowly from a spunky, independent, fast-talking, 70-something woman to a bed-ridden, nursing cared-for woman who was grieved knowing that she couldn’t even speak to her family members in her last days of life because the disease had prohibited the use of the former singer’s vocal chords.

My last memory of her is Easter Sunday, 1999.  We escorted her to a room big enough to hold 3 generations of extended family and we sang for her until she cried.  We cried as we sang for her and she smiled.  Looking around the room, everyone sort of knew that these would be our last moments with her.  Two weeks later she died and that was the hardest loss I have ever experienced.  I was fourteen.

I will just have to pray peace and strength for my family in the coming months… I don’t know what else to do.