My mother’s mother, Agnes, died 17 years ago on this day- September 26, 1991. I was devastated. Somehow, to my child self, it felt more than the way a normal little girl is devastated when her Grandmother goes. It was the first major loss I would suffer. It was the first time I saw my Mother as a human and not just my mother. It was the first time I realized that nothing lasts forever. It was the beginning of years of change. It was in a way, the official end of my childhood.
My Grandfather, Harold, started dating some months after my Grandmother died. To say that I was angry really doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt. I was confused. I questioned if he ever really loved my Grandmother in the first place. I was so mad at him for wanting to be with someone else. I did not want him to have the power to change our family. I did not want him to make a decision that was making me feel terrible. Worse yet, I did not want to watch my Mother suffer even more. Damn, I was mad. And, just when I thought things could not get any worse than they already were, my Mother sat me down and told me that he was going to marry the woman he had been dating.
“WHAT?!?!” It hadn’t even been a year!?! My Grandmother had not even been gone for a year and he was going to marry ANOTHER WOMAN? What was he thinking? Who IS this woman? How dare he put his own happiness before the rest of our grieving process! I just won’t like her. I won’t be nice to her. I won’t talk to her. Is he doing this to hurt all of us? I won’t…
My mother stopped me, calmly (how she was calm, I still don’t know.) She asked me about a time that she and I had gone to my Grandfathers house, sometime in late January after the first very difficult holiday season without my Grandmother. The magic (the little of it that was around that year) of the holidays had come to a freezing end and the miserable stretch before spring was settling around all of us. We walked in the door together. I didn’t see much. I just remember seeing my Grandfather there, in his recliner, not talking clearly. My mom told me to go back to the car and I did. He was drunk. I guess he was probably really drunk. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that he was slipping. He was slipping fast. Something had to give…and then it did. Along came Arlene.
Arlene and my Grandfather were married on October 3, 1992, just a year and some days after my Grandmother had gone. We all stood up there by them because my Mother told us that was, “the thing to do.” Part of me was furious with her too. Why was she being so nice about all of this? Why wasn’t she flaming pissed like me?
Oh, children’s brains.
Of course time passed and I moved into my official teenage years and as I did, I became proud of myself for ‘forgiving’ my Grandfather for getting remarried, for loving someone new. I was proud of myself for liking (and then loving) Arlene and trying so hard and building bridges. What a ridiculous thought that was. How egotistical and childish it was, when in reality, I should have been asking for his forgiveness for the way I acted and for the fact that I was putting my own happiness before his. But, nonetheless, I was a kid.
The fact of the matter is that I did not wake up in that empty house, the one that he had lived in for 40 years with the woman that he loved. I was not alone there, feeling her presence around every corner, hearing her voice paint the walls, smelling her things that still filled the closets. I did not live inside of him. I did not feel his pain. The pain I felt at the loss was a fraction of the pain and impact that it had on my Grandfather.
Everyone has heard the saying “all you must do is pay taxes and die.” When I think about that idea, I can’t help but immediately think about how that is just not true. The saying really should be “all you must do is change and die.” Change, although many times painful, is inevitable. It happens every year, every month, every day, every hour, every minute, every second and every moment of time. Nature gives us the changing of the seasons to remind us that change is a necessary part of our lives.
One can only have one’s own internal reaction to change. Someone makes a decision that effects your life, that changes it in some way, big or small, and all one can think is “wow, that really hurts me because (insert reason.)” One’s first reaction is not “I wonder what lead up to this decision, I wonder what happened behind closed doors, I wonder how much pain that person has been going through.” Those are never the first thoughts when something changes. The first thought is always personal. That is not a good or bad thing- that is just the way it is. Then, moving on past that first thought is where things get really sticky. It is a choice to be made, work to be done. People make changes in their lives because things are not going the way they want them to, because something feels wrong, bad- maybe even hopeless. People do not walk away from good things for no reason at all and people do not always want to air the reason out in the open for everyone to see. And as we do not question the changing of the seasons, why question the changing in our lives?
In all the changes that have taken place in my life the past years, I am finally coming to terms with not fighting them. People die, people move, they fall in love and they fall out of it, they get divorced, they have babies, they lose babies, they go to school, change jobs, come home, leave, get sick, have fights, misunderstandings, they make up, they break up, they live and all of that is change. I do not believe in leaving someone. Someone cannot be left. Yes, paths go in different directions and decisions are made to take you further away (physically or mentally) from one another, but you can never leave someone behind. They have said something or done something to change you and that is something that cannot be undone. Therefore, they are simply a part of you. Forever.
So, on this day, seventeen years later, I am reminded of all the changes that occurred because of and after my Grandmother’s passing. My Grandfather’s wife, Arlene, and her family have become our family. They are now a part of us and we are now a part of them. It was a change that I fought and I thought I may never get over, but now has become something in my life that I am so thankful for. I like to think that it was my Grandmother’s last gift to us- a lesson in forgiveness, pure love and, of course…change.
