Second blog post and here we are talking about death. But I do believe it is something we must talk about as normally as any other topic.

Perhaps death to me is such a normal matter because of how large my family is. Well, I think it’s large because I have many reserved spots in my heart for people who are beyond my nuclear family – even beyond my grandparents. I have great relationships with the cousins and siblings of my grandparents. I enjoy spending time with the cousins of my parents. I think my 2^nd cousins are just as close to me as the 1^st ones. And maybe deaths feel even more consistent because it takes some time to get used to someone no longer being with you.

I have 2 grandmothers that passed away within a month – one is my mother’s aunt and the other is the cousin of my dad’s mother. I know a lot of people do not have relationships with relatives this far in terms of consanguinity, but I admired these 2 women. And I know that they loved me just as much, too. Let me tell you why I adore them, and why I think they love me.

The first grandma mentioned, who I never really remember meeting as a child, was a lovely old lady. She says she first met me when I was a toddler, when my parents, my 2 other siblings, and I lived with my grandpa. She said I was the little girl who was climbing up the shelves in Grandpa’s living room, and my father had to run to me to get me down. It amuses me how she remembers me from that, and how she doesn’t know me as anything else but as that rambunctious little thing. We met again when I was around 22, and she took an instant liking to me. She told me mother fondly, “she looks like… me!”

And I don’t know why that touched me so much. Perhaps it was, and still is, because I don’t particularly like a lot of myself. I think there is so little to like about the way I look and present myself. But someone grew instantly fond of me just because she saw herself in me. And that made me think a little more about the way I also see myself.

The second grandma who died more recently was someone I’ve known all my life. She is the grandmother all of us in the family would approach and say hello to, genuinely out of wanting to and not out of fear of being seen as disrespectful. She always had a gentle smile on her face when she saw someone she recognized, and as soft spoken as she was, she was not one to hide her opinions and thoughts. But she was good at masking reprimands. She would make clear her disappointments, but you would not feel terrible after. You could start talking again about another topic and proceed from her tender scoldings.

Having been a recipient of her loving admonishments, it made me think about what made her think of me so special to take me out on dates, to spend time with me and only me during family gatherings. I don’t know what I have ever told her, what I have ever done, for her to keep talking to and listening to me. And after all the things we’ve spoken about, our relationship only continued to grow through the years. I don’t think I’ve improved as a person since the first time she and I established our relationship, both as adults.

But maybe I have. Or maybe Grandma trusted that I was continuing to improve. It must be one of the two. Well, I’d like to believe it’s one of the two. There must be a reason why she would reach out even after months of no contact, even if it was just to say hello. She never forgot – or let go – of the fact that I hadn’t graduated college, and that I hadn’t taken the exam for me to work as a regular employee in government offices. Heck, she had not forgotten me even if she was starting to forget a lot of other people.

What a wonderful thing it is to be loved by people like these two. Writing this post made me realize that I might not be as lackluster and terrible as I think I am. These two women have each gone through over eight decades of existence and still managed to find something so special in me. And that is something I can think about tonight before I go to bed, when all the awful things that haunt me come before I grow terrified of going to sleep and having nightmares.

Thank you for reading through this rather ramble-y post. I appreciate you stopping by today. Til next time!