Backwards N High Heels

Balancing work and play while wearing many hats (I mean heels).

I Remember Everything About One Year Ago Today

My hair was long, loosely curled, my gold-rimmed sunglasses sat on top of my head. I donned a denim button-up top, paired with my favorite white skinny jeans, and the leopard print Sperry sneakers that always cut into the top of my foot, but I wear them anyways.

My mother and I spilled into the lobby carrying on our conversation and laughter after a three-hour car ride together. We took our time finding a bathroom and I even treated myself to a white mocha at the coffee shop that served Starbucks to guests just inside the hospital.

I followed my mother who had been there days before to the elevator, which opened into a large sitting area with huge floor-to-ceiling windows, we cut to the left, made a right, and walked down the hall, and into her room.

I remember everything about one year ago today.

It was a chaotic greeting. One that we didn’t expect. There were nurses and a doctor. There were beeping sounds and she was fighting. Wanting to sit up, wanting to take the oxygen mask off, wanting to see a friendly face I had hoped, and maybe even wanting to understand.

I took one sip of that coffee before it sat near the window in her hospital room and there it remained.

Our world was flipped within minutes of greeting her. Just hours before, my Mom and I discussed the steps it would take to bring my grandmother closer to home for healthcare. My mom could be closer to her, and provide frequent and constant care. We didn’t know her body was failing. We didn’t expect the doctor to so blatantly tell us her state was unfix-able. We didn’t plan for that day to turn so hopeless.

I am pretty sure the initial doctor’s words and explanation of the dire situation at hand sank into a reality for me before they did my mother. Looking back it was like slow motion watching everyone in the room swirl around me as I looked at my grandmother in her bed, and watched my mother trying to process the words from the staff.

I felt sick. There was an immediate wave of nauseousness and I was scared to touch her, fearful that my touch may cause pain or propel something terrible to happen to her body.

But then, I looked at her hands. Her beautiful, tiny, soft hands. They were the hands that rocked me as a baby. The hands that scratched my back as I laid across her lap as a child. The hands that mixed the world’s best potato salad. The hands that buckled me in the car on weekend drives. The hands that wiped my tears when I poured out my problems. The hands that squeezed mine on my wedding day.

In the scariness of the room, the beeping of unknown machines, the conversations between the nurses, the various cords that hung from machines and draped across her body, it was her hands that I reached for and squeezed.

April 11, 2018, was the last day I touched those hands, looked into her eyes, whispered ‘I love you,’ kissed her rosy cheeks, and the last time I saw her alive to say ‘goodbye.’

I knew walking out of the hospital that day I would never again see the woman who I had loved so much, who had raised me like a second mom, and who I had admired since a little girl.

And, I wanted to say ‘I love you’ again. Just once more. Even after the painful goodbye and walk away, I contemplated running back to her and doing it all again.

But the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and big white puffy clouds waved to us as we sat numb in our car before driving away.

I remember everything about one year ago today.

Some days it feels like she left us yesterday, especially when I feel the sudden urge to call her and suddenly remember she is gone. Other moments, these 365 days feel more like years that we have been a part.

I remember everything about one year ago today, and I remember everything about her.

It is hard to forget someone so special and someone who impacted your life the way she did mine.

I never imagined life without her in it. In fact, I was naive enough not to think about what it would be like with her gone.

But here I stand. 365 days since I last saw her physically on this Earth, and while the pain from remembering everything about one year ago today lives on in my heart and head, I pray to never ever forget anything about her.

Someone Is Missing

Someone-Is-Missing_Grief_BackwardsNHighHeelsBlog
The day of her funeral I found myself feeling an immense sense of emptiness, sadness, and exhaustion. If you have lost someone exceptionally close to you, I imagine you can relate. The feeling is numb, with pangs of sorrow that stab your gut out of nowhere.

After the service had ended, after following the hearse, after a brief, intimidate family moment at the cemetery, my husband and I were en route to pick up our daughter from his mother’s house. The only way I know how to describe what my body and mind was going through is to relate it to a plug hidden somewhere on my body that had been released. You know, the plastic plugs that are placed on inflatable balloon toys? Someone must have pulled it from me. But, BAM out of no where, as if someone decided to blow hot air into the deflated balloon, bringing it back to life, I would be hit with the deepest sadness and reminder of her being gone. Sobs would overcome me and I ached in a need that I knew nothing could fulfill.

Family and friends gathered after the service for food and togetherness. I still find it odd that we as American’s observe the conclusion of death services with a lunch/dinner service. Usually eating is the last thing on most of our minds, yet we gather and try to carry on some sort of conversation with those around us.

As I walked into the room, holding my three-year-old’s hand, searching for a seat, I found myself subconsciously scouring the room. “Who is missing?” I recall thinking, my eyes gazing up and down the rows of tables and chairs, seeing face after face. “Someone is missing.” I felt anxious, identifying my siblings in the room, to make sure they all had made it back from the cemetery. There was my mom and dad, paternal grandparents, and cousins. As I made eye contact again with my mom, the words were on the tip of my tongue, “Who is missing?” But quickly before the breath turned into a voice, a heavy weight hit me, it was her. She was missing.

It is a moment, a feeling, and a reality I will always remember when I think back to her services. She was missing. She will always be missing.

And, that is the part that lingers with someone’s family after death. A feeling I have never experienced fully until she left us.

When someone suffers with grief – noticed I said with, not through, because we never get through the grief, often friends and family with best intentions will say things such as, “It will get better,” or “Every day it gets easier.” The sentiments are meant well, but being so fresh off of her death, it feels too soon to imagine those days. The reality is there is now a point in our lives that we will always refer to as with her in it and with her gone. Living now in the “with her gone” phase is a mix of guilt and sadness.

I find myself wishing for more time to make every day count. I should have visited her more. I should have called more often. I could have taken Logan to see her more and made more time. More, more, more – everything is about the more I wish I could have done.

Then there is the sadness part. Realizing every major milestone that now lies ahead of us, she won’t physically be here for. She is missing. A giant void is now in her place.

I am a Christian. I believe in God and I know she is living eternity in Heaven. I rejoice in knowing she watches me and her bright spirit is around us. We breathe her in. She walks beside us. She lives through us, she lives through me. But, I am here on Earth and she is not, and right now that does not feel like enough. That is where the sorrow begins and doesn’t end.

I read a quote shortly after my grandmother died, “Grief is love with no place to go.” Oh, how true. I have nowhere to send all this love since she is not physically here to receive it. Instead it sits inside my heart spinning round and round, and I sit here missing her.

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Today you can honor her or someone you are missing by sharing kindness. I encourage you to spread love and a random act of kindness in their name.