December 1, 2006: The Day my Grandma died

This is copied & pasted from the rambling I wrote back in November, about a month before the anniversary of my Grandma's death. In case the iBook croaks, I want to have this somewhere else.

The iBook that this is written on once belonged to my Grandma, so you can imagine that nearly six years after her death, it’s a rather old laptop. It was originally given to my dad, who had zero interest in it. I ended up with it. The case and the laptop still smell like Grandma’s house. I know this, but for some reason today when I opened up the machine and the smell hit me I started crying.

I think part of it is that I realize my own daughter will be a year old in a week, and that she’ll never know the awesome woman that was my Grandma. Part of it is that the Holidays always make me miss the family I used to have.

I have pictures, and stories, but somehow I wish I had more to share with Addy. To let her know just how great of a woman she’s named after. I mean, Emoline has popped up as a name throughout our family for generations, but the most recent before my own lovely daughter was my Grandma.

December First will mark six years since my Grandma died. I’m pretty sure that day is burned into my memory for eternity. I was sitting in my living room in my very first apartment at 2353 1/2 N. High Street, just north of the OSU campus. I was waiting for my mom to show up, as we were heading down to the hospital to visit Grandma. She’d had a nasty stroke but had started to recover. I remember answering the door for mom, and telling her I still had to get my shoes on because I’d gotten sucked into something on TV.  She sat down on the futon that was our couch, and told me we weren’t going to the hospital because Grandma had died that morning. She’d gotten the phone call shortly before heading up to get me.

She had been recovering from the strokes she’d had. One nasty and a couple of mini strokes. She was mentally there if not there fully physically. From my uinderstanding, she had several massive strokes one after the other that finally took her out. I’m not gonna lie, I hope I have half of her resiliency. Seriously, it took MULTIPLE MASSIVE STROKES to take that little Irishwoman out.

My mommy held me as I cried my eyes out, and she barely shed a tear. Her own mommy had just died, yet she paused her mourning to comfort me. I guess that’s what you do as a mommy, you take care of your kids first and yourself later. She stayed with me until she absolutely had to leave to get back to work. I went upstairs and curled up in my bed, crying. I set an alarm for when I had to get up and get myself put together for work as I worked the short shift at FYE that evening. I left my bed to pee, to grab a snack and drink, and to feed my gecko, Henry. Other than that I didn’t leave that bed until my alarm went off and I had to get myself presentable and head off to work.

Apparently the fact that I was going in to work after a major trauma was too much for the powers that be. Heading down I-71, a tire on my trusty Dodge Intrepid blew. Yup, tire blowout on the highway. It gets better. My jack broke. Mom came to rescue me, and her jack broke. Stupid Intrepid. Fortunately an ODOT first responder found me, and he had a heavy duty floor jack so we were able to get my spare put on the car. It gets better still. As if my Grandma dying and my tire blowing out wasn’t enough to ruin my day, my spare was flat. At this point, fortunately, I’d already called work crying and trying to explain that I would be late. Lucky for me I had a great boss and she told me to just take the night off, get myself and my car together, and to call if I wouldn’t be in for my shift the next day.

I ended up in my mom’s car, leaving mine on the side of the highway, and going to my parents’ house. Luckily, I drove my own car home that evening after my dad rescued it and fixed my flat tire.