Saying Goodbye

Dear Granny,

I wanted to get the chance to tell you goodbye.  I wanted to tell you one more time that I love you.  I wanted to ask you to tell Grandpa hello for me.  I wanted to tell you I am sorry for anything I did that hurt your feelings growing up.  I wanted to tell you that I forgive you for the times that you hurt me.

But goodbye came too soon.

I am so thankful you aren't suffering, that you no longer have to struggle and fight against a body riddled with disease.  I am so thankful for the dinner plates you shared every year during Thanksgiving and Christmas,  that taught me never to forget the hungry, the lonely, the elderly.   I am thankful for the beauty shop trips, the happy meal on the last day of VBS, and I am thankful for the harder memories. The ones that aren't so fun to remember.  

Some day I believe I will see you again, until then I cannot even imagine the amazingly awesome things you are getting to see right now.  I cannot imagine what it was like, that moment where you took your last breath here, your first breath there.  To close your eyes lying in a hospital bed and to open them up for eternity...what was that like?  

But even when I think about those things I still struggle to tell you goodbye.

Today driving home from a fun outing with my family I was sad, the reality that you are gone hit me...again.  But then we passed another driver who wasn't paying any attention at all to where they were going and as the  laughter bubbled up, I found myself crying for a completely different reason.  Seeing that distracted driver took me back thirty plus years, I was sitting in the front passenger seat and you were behind the wheel of old blue.  Your car.  You were by chance one of the worst drivers ever.  You would be driving down the road in that thing, remember something in your pocketbook and just lean over to the passenger floorboard to dig through it :).  Completely forgetting that you were driving, therefor that you needed to watch where you were going.  More than once I was convinced the trip to the drug store would be the last thing my five year old self would make.  This was long before cellphones, texting, and even a CD player.  Heaven help us if you'd had those to distract you.

So, anyway, I just wanted to say I love you, one more time.  And that goodbyes suck.  They always come too soon.