My Grandparents Died This Past Year. It Felt Like Entering a Kaleidoscope of Death.

In the past year, both my Grandpa Gayle and my Grandma Betty passed away.

Grandpa Gayle was a kind man. He had the best chuckle. When he smiled, it didn’t light up the room; it made the room feel light. I’m convinced he could remember the names of every family that lived in the towns he had lived in. He was a storyteller. He was a good human.

I was standing alone in my house – in my kitchen – when my mom sent the text telling us he had died. I remember jumping into crisis mode and texting back immediately my plan to begin driving north.

And then I sank to the floor of the kitchen and cried.

In the months since, I’ve made the joke: “he died doing what he loved: burning stuff in the backyard.” And while that’s probably not quite true, for me it kind-of is. He was a fixer and a doer and a troubleshooter. Work boots on with a project – his happy place. And he was a caregiver. A life-long and loving caregiver. He seemed to be learning new ways to care until the very end of his life. There’s so much wisdom in that…

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Grandma Betty had battled dementia for a decade and this made her death hard in a very different way for me.

In the last couple years of her life, it felt very much like the Betty I knew had already died…gone was the laughter, the witty remarks, and any sense of real connection. Even the reminders that I should be a “soldier in god’s army” no longer graced my ears as we hugged goodbye on visits. (I didn’t miss that part.)

It’s beyond cruel what dementia does to people. It strips away everything until all you have left is your inherent dignity and then it goes for that too. It’s ruthless.

If there are things worse than death, that’s one of them…

My dad taught me that every time we experience death, we experience it through all the other deaths we’ve known. Our bodies remember.

And so losing my last grandparents felt a bit like entering a kaleidoscope of death. In watching them pass, I felt my experience of Grandma Gladys’ death again. And Ellen and T. James’. And, for some reason, Robin Williams’.

It doesn’t escape me that all of these people had great laughs. I’m holding onto that.

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