This meant I was feeling pretty chuffed as I stood on the train platform awaiting my preferred ride to meet my favourite colleagues for coffee in the city. That was until I looked at my phone and dropped to my knees wailing with grief and guilt. The text message from my dad informed me that my grandma died in the night. Completely unexpectedly and without warning the most pragmatic, stalwart, patient, and witty person I've ever had the wondrous fortune to know slipped from this realm into the unknown.
Ninety-five years and three days. Five children, 12 grand-children, 14+ great-grand-children, and a handful of great-great-grandchildren. Infinite love dispersed across the planet. Those are just a few of the metrics of her life. The only love I've ever had that paralleled that for my children was for her. She never once spoiled me, but she gave the best damn hugs and knew how to really listen.
My grief consumed me but amazing friends from around the globe wrapped me in their virtual arms and shared wisdom and condolences. One gifted me this most stunningly beautiful piece of writing that perfectly encapsulates my own thoughts on death:
“In the fabric of space time we all dance upon the rhythm of existence. We all laugh and love and cry and sing silly songs. If we are lucky we find some kindred souls to act a wee bit crazy with. She left her mark of wisdom upon your very heart. So her journey here has counted. Honor her existence by screaming how much she meant to you into the abyss of entropy. True Love is never lost to time. It only changes form. Render your love for her into new loving acts. Love must be given away to be renewed. And in those giving acts of yours, her passing will be counted in the sedimentary layers of collective wisdom. Footsteps in the eternal muddy depths of time. Layered sequences of emotion, eternally deformed by the very weight of your perception. Just as the very act of perception can alter the manifestation of a single photon, so your perception of her, alters the course of eternity. She counted, and was counted in the complex equations in the calculus of your being. She has passed from light as photons into light as pure wave form described as sine waves of improbability passing through the refraction grating of your memories. Cast her interference into your future projections of self. Honor her well dear friend.”
So, I continue to offer up my writing as a form of love for those to whom I can give nothing else. May you all find some solace here as I spread my wings and fly homeward to take her to her final resting place.
