Grandma Thoughts

It's been almost a year since my grandma, Norma, died, and I just realised recently that I haven't felt sad about it in a while. It's a weird thing to realise, but for about six months after it happened, I kept thinking about it and feeling stunned or sad. Suddenly, that thing isn't there anymore. I feel normal. This is just normal.

Here she is with a beautiful robot.

It's kind of an impossible to externalise feeling, and I think every time someone dies it's quite different for a huge amount of reasons, but I really did feel changed by it. I felt, for a while, like the world was really quite different before and after. There are ways in which I feel like I know her better post-death. Like there are things about her I didn't really notice or think about when she was alive. The fact that she tended to wear dark reds and purples and pinks. That's something I think about often, for some reason. Just 'her' colours.

And in a way it makes me happy, not that she's dead but that I know how it works. That I know that there can be a weird joy in whatever it is that a person has left behind. Ideas, memories, objects, colours. That maybe if someone else died it would, in some way, at some point, just be okay.

I feel like now I've had the training unit about your grandma dying and I can easily do stuff like "have a grandma die". I feel oddly emboldened. 

Death is really weird, and I hope it never happens to me.