Tag: grief

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Conversations in the Kitchen

Emmy follows me around the kitchen. “Mommy, where is my Santa Claus?”

“Your what?” It’s March. Why is she looking for Santa Claus?

“Mommy, I want my Santa Claus!” Emmy insisted. I racked my brain to figure out what she was talking about. It finally dawned on me that over the weekend, Ed had bought Emmy her own dental floss.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As you can imagine, two and a half year old Emmy is struggling to wrap her head around Grandma being gone. “Grandma is sick,” she’ll often say. “When will Grandma get better?”

Lily, in her wise old age of five, will answer Emmy with an answer she’s heard me give: “Grandma’s all better now because she’s in heaven.”

“Mommy, don’t die.” Emmy says as I look at her.

“Mommy, how old will you be when you die?” follows up Lily in this unsettling conversation I am having with my children.

“One hundred!” I exclaim.

“Why, Mom?”

“Because I would miss you too much to die.”

Lily reprimands me, saying, “Heaven is magical, Mommy. People don’t miss each other when they are in heaven.”

Heaven has no time, my mother once told me. She believed that once you got to Heaven, you wouldn’t feel like you were waiting for your loved ones to join you.

How did Lily know?

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Not Sweet, Just Bitter

Ugh. Life handed us another sour, sour bite of life. Not the kind of sour where you screw up your face and laugh in delight, like when you bite into really sour, juicy lemon. The bitter kind of sour; the kind of sour that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

It was almost too much to bear, but we are bearing it. Just a couple of months after my mother’s death, we have also lost my grandmother. She was unable to understand why her daughter had gone to heaven before her. In January, she fell and broke her arm, and was just unable to recover. And so another trip to Iowa, another funeral.

I’m keeping this brief. I’m tired of writing about grief. I’m tired of crying.

Even though this has been a blow to my family, good things are happening. Good things that help us keep going. One of my cousins is worried, I think, that Grandma was the tie that bound us together, and now we’ll lose touch. But we won’t let that happen. I promise.