My Grandmother’s Death

                My grandma died when I was a junior in high school.  She suffered from a stroke long before that and never fully recovered. One of the last times I saw her alive was one day when my dad took me into her hospital room, and she and my grandpa were there.  The look in her eyes probably should have been vacant, but it wasn’t.  Instead of her eyes being hollow, without liveliness or emotion, they were animated, alive.  They were orange; with an orange glow when she leaned over to her side in her bed to look at me.  Before this, at the moment I walked in, my grandfather broke the silence with a simple question, “Did you have a hamburger, Amy?”  I don’t remember the exact wording of the question, but it was something like that.  My grandpa was to her left, I saw as we walked in, and my Dad took his seat by her side.  I remember that was the first time I had seen that quantity of emotion and love in my Dad’s eyes; compared to with anyone else- with my mother, my sister, even me.  My grandmother, throughout her whole life as a wife and mother, had been the backbone of the family, but I don’t think that’s why he loved her so much.  I think it’s because he knew that she loved him unconditionally.  My dad has his faults, but he also has his moments; where he showed his good side, and this time was one of them.  He was on her side, at that very moment, literally and figuratively.  The television was on when my dad told his parents about my sister’s plans for high school, but that didn’t break the gaze that she set on me.  I was probably too young to really understand what was going on at the moment, how, even though my grandma was stuck as a stroke victim for the rest of her life, she had all the support in the world, from my Dad, from my other aunts and uncles, from my sister and my mother, and from me.

Remembering My Grandmother

I was young when my grandmother died.  She had suffered from a stroke, as well as a heart attack, earlier in her life.  She was an immigrant from Ireland, as well as my grandpa.  I have the best memories of sitting at the kitchen table in my grandparents’ kitchen, silently watching television shows like “My So-Called Life,” while my dad and grandparents sat and made small talk.  My grandpa was in his fifties around this time, and I remember him, wearing his Peoples Gas hoodie, sitting by my grandma, as I also looked at pictures of my aunts and uncles as children, playing in the snow.  There were several years when my intermediate family and my dad’s side of the family didn’t talk, due to a fall out involving my dad and grandpa, but later in my life it was resolved, and I got the chance to be with my grandma, at her hospital bed, before she was sent to heaven.