Yesterday, September 10th, 2025, I received the call from my mom that my maternal grandmother had died. This is where I have to frame this properly because my grandmother hasn’t been Granny for a number of years, at this point. The past few years, in particular, it was a genuine surprise every time she managed to physically make it into the next day. I, specifically, have already grieved her, been grieving. The kind of process that comes from knowing your loved one is at the end and they’ll never get better. That their Personage is gone and they only thing left is for the body to follow in the long downward slope toward oblivion.
The kind of fucked up thing is that this is third time I’ve been through this specific experience. More recently and in a more detached way was my husband’s grandmother. She too went through a long mental deterioration before ending up in hospice. That was maybe six or seven years now.
The first was my grandfather, husband to my just deceased grandmother, my mother’s father.
Grandpa had his first stroke in the late 90s, when I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. It was between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that would set the tone for the next decade. Every other year, Grandpa had some kind of medical emergency. Another stroke. A heart attack. Every other year was a question of whether he’d be out of the hospital in time for Christmas. Sometimes he was. Sometimes he wasn’t.
At one point, early, he got a knee replacement, joints already roughshod from his years as a college football player then a Marine. What should have given him some of his mobility back became a more complex physical disability because he refused to do the physical therapy and follow-ups as prescribed by his doctors. In a lot of ways, he let himself fall apart, only eighty-three when he finally passed in December of 2006.
At the time, for me at least, it was like letting out a breath I had been holding for a very long time. I was seventeen, in my senior year of high school, and my grandfather’s deteriorating health had been a specter haunting the background of my existence for the vast majority of my conscious life to that point.
I was a little alone in this, among my family.
This was very evident in my older sister’s reaction to Grandpa’s death. There are just short of sixteen years, between her birth and mine. I’m the youngest of my generation of cousins, and she’s the oldest (technically the second oldest, but what’s a big southern family without a secret cousin?). Her father also died when she was only a toddler. My sister then both got the benefit of a few spoiled early years and our grandfather stepping in as a secondary father-figure. He took her out fishing and boating. There are pictures of them camping and swimming at the lake together. She venerates him and maintains a collection of his old things (of which I’m grateful in an existential way for the historical maintenance of it all).
But my grandad was an asshole to me. He was one of my earliest and biggest bullies. Whether the result of a stroke-based personality change or not, he was not a pleasant person to be around, and I have very few particularly fond memories. But I’m also kind of the only one of any of us who went through the specific experiences I did, so I bit my tongue and shut my mouth and emotionally supported my mom.
My grandmother, though, followed some of this exact same path. She has been deteriorating for a very very long time. Every time my mother-in-law asked after her, the only response I’ve been able to give for a number of years is, “she’s still alive somehow.”
And that sounds horrible, but I really can’t impress enough how little a quality of life she had. It’s one of those things that you really only understand when you experience it.
Yet again, I see the convergence between my sister and mine exeperience with our grandmother. She got the full grandmother experience, a secondary caregiver who extended that courtesy to my niece and nephew when they were born. My sister got a grandmother who supported her through several major traumas (that I never needed, thankfully), while I got one who needed help sorting through her dead husband’s clothes. She taught me how to use the sewing machine but was often late to my school functions. She took me out shopping but always had to be home within a couple of hours or my grandpa would be upset. Us both caught under the boot of my grandpa’s stubbornness.
I love Granny dearly. Of course I do. In contrast to my grandpa, I have more good memories than not. We had a good time together. But I got so few good years with her after being freed from the burden of grandpa’s caregiving but before she started to slip away. We never get the version of our grandparents that our parents got, but mine is so different from even my sister’s that it feels alien.
So my grief becomes a complex thing. A sigh of relief that the pain is gone. That my family is no longer being held emotionally hostage by an event we all know is coming down the line. Where you’re okay but then sort of feel bad for feeling okay. Like your grief should look like a certain thing, and it doesn’t. While at the same time knowing, intellectually, that you feel how you feel, and there’s not much to really be done about it.
All while trying to figure out which ring you’re supposed to be in, because we’re all in the same one.
Pixels and Pins Studio 