bad week May 21, 2009

This past week has been immensely rough on me in every way possible. After scraping by and doing well on another round of big tests I thought that I had finally gotten a break, free from stress and worry, at least for a few days. Until.. I wake up last Friday morning to find four missed calls and three messages from my mother, as soon as I heard the first word on the first message, my name, in a quivering voice, I knew what had happened- my grandfather had died.

He had been getting progressively sicker for a very long time, with strokes, pneumonia, chronic weight loss and terrible dementia. For the last year he’s been in a care facility because he had gotten so bad. My mother and her sisters had all come down there to take care of him, and each other, that last week before it happened, but then last Thursday at 8:00 he passed peacefully in his sleep. While it is truly a blessing, and we all knew that it was coming, it’s still one of those things that you just can’t be prepared for, not entirely at least.

The funeral was set for Monday in Peoria, IL, all I had to do was make it through the weekend. I thought that it would be helpful to get out of the house and be busy to take my mind off of everything, and to a point it was, but then we got so busy because the Ringling Brother’s Circus was across the street all weekend, that it just became too much and I was barely holding it together. The next day, Saturday, I had to close again, still depressed and distracted, but now becoming sick, very sick, all night at yet another incredibly stressful night at work. Near the end I broke down, sobbing, my lymph nodes were so swollen I could barely breath and had a skyrocketing fever, and here I was working, slaving, while trying to defeat the terrible pangs of sadness that washed over me. Not my best days.

On Sunday we were finally able to make the 6 and a half hour drive to Peoria, after working 23 hours in the previous two days with less than 9 hours of sleep between the two because of how awful I felt. Upon arrival it was actually really nice to see all my family, close and extended, because it is just so rare to get all of us together at the same time. Nowadays it’s only weddings and funerals that can bring us all back together, more so funerals.

The next day was the service itself, and after days of mourning I thought that I was prepared, but no, nothing can prepare you for that moment when you walk in and you see that person, that person you knew all your life, lying there, lifeless and alone, a shell of the person you grew up knowing. My grandfather was about 5′9″ and at his death had shrunk down to a terrifyingly frail 108 pounds, seeing that is so jarring to the system there is really no recovery.

The service was very lovely, and he received military burial rites with the flag going to my cousin stationed in Afghanistan. During the whole ceremony I came to the horrifying and wholly depressing thought: everyone I know and love will die and leave me. The more people that I care for in life, then the more excruciating pain I will have to endure. Someday, I will have to bury my mother, my father, ever my closest friends and John. And the thought of that is still sending me into a terrible state, because I don’t think that this is ever going to get easier, but rather, just harder and harder with each person who leaves me.

We left the next day after a nice family breakfast and headed back east. My terrible cold is finally receding and I feel a little less numb, which is why I finally decided to write about all this a week later because I didn’t think that I would be strong enough to before, but even now I can’t stop crying.

I just feel so alone and vulnerable.