Well the longtime expected and inevitable happened last night.
I received a call while I was on my way to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport from my mother letting me know that I may need to take some time off from work soon in order to attend to family business dealing with the death of my grandmother, she was sick in the nursing home, fluid in the lungs, and they were giving her morphine for the pain. She was not expected to make it through this time like she had in the past.
I am sad but at the same time I am not devastated about it since it was something that almost all of us have been expecting to happen for awhile now.
A little bit about my grandmother, she was just past her 101st birthday when she passed on. She lived a hell of a long life and was an amazing woman.
She has 5 children, and lost her husband while the children were still young so that put her in charge of providing for the family.
So back to work she went. She was a grade school teacher before she had children and she went back to teaching after the death of her husband in the mid 1950’s. She then taught until the late 1970’s when she retired.
She was very active as she got older, she lived on her own until her 90’s and she drove her own car until then too, and she was not the typical old blue hair that you all know so well, she drove normally.
She was a great woman, a great mother, a great teacher, a great grandmother, and someone who’s life, accomplishments, and personality can be admired by any and all who knew her.
I know she had a good life and she knows she had a good life, and for all of us who knew her, loved her, and had our lives affected by her are better people because of her, and those us who knew her will always remember her and try to emulate those qualities which she had that were so special.