One year...

my grandma's birthday (i'm pregnant with emily in this photo)
On my way to brazil for the summer on a missions trip 1992
picking up grandma from the airport...i'm 5-ish in this photo
my sister and grandma at her 85th birthday party
emily and 'g-g'
my mom when she was a baby and my grandma

i can't believe it's been one year since my grandma died.  it's been one year and one week since i've looked into her eyes, held her hand, heard her voice (although, i hear her "hello hello love" in my head often...i'm so thankful), smelt her perfume on my clothes after a long hug...  the year has passed.  there are no more 'firsts' without her.  although, as the kids grow up, there will always be the firsts that she'll miss in that way...

death is so final.  i know that sounds utterly redundant.  but it is.  i miss her.  we were so close.  i saw her almost every weekend of my life for 32 years.  and the loss of her is very significant.  we were a small family prior to her death, but now...we are even smaller.  it's just my mother, father, sister and i now.  the kids and ryan add SOOO much, but that is really it.  my dad has no family left and my mother's family lives a bit away-although we keep in touch, it's just not the same.  

here is a link to a slideshow of her life that we had done for her memorial service last year.  

life does go on...and grief does continue...it's hard though.  it's hard to grieve a grandparent, i've discovered.  i sometimes feel as though i need to explain myself...as if to qualify to people why i am still so sad.  there are just some moments that come up (like in class last week, we had two people loose their grandmas and their stories of them brought up memories and grief in me to the point i had to leave class to go cry) that you can't supress and you need to grieve in that moment.  but explaining that to people is hard because not everyone is close to their grandparent.  she was almost like another mother to me.  and i also don't want to supress my pain entirely either.  i have a friend who tragically lost their son in november to a horrific disease.  she remarks that people expect you to move on, to have a happy ending and be a neat little package again, because they themselves don't know how to respond to grief.  is life really like that?  i find life to be happy and completely complicated all in the same moment sometimes!  i have so very much appreciated my friends words on her own pain in loss because it is as though it gives me permission to feel the pain i feel.   

blogging about it has helped this evening.  we are going to visit grandma tomorrow, put some fresh flowers on her and my grandfathers site...i pray that we can grieve as a family.  we are very much a family of individual emotions.  not often do we share our pain in one anothers presence, we sort of go cry on our own and come back to one another all dried up and fixed.  i pray we can talk about her tomorrow...laugh...cry...just be how we need to be tomorrow with each other.  

i'm sure there is so much more to still process...i feel as though i have been processing this whole year.  i'm grateful for life, that it can be complicated and layered and full.  and i am so thankful to have lived 32 years of my life knowing my grandma, virginia jane gordon.