Heart lines

I'm finding it hard to frame the grief I'm feeling.

When my grandma, Rosie, died, her health declined very quickly. She was only meant to be in the hospice for two weeks so she could sort her medication out and get back on her feet, but she died eleven days after admission. I was working a lot at the time and so didn't visit during the first week but sent my love across, when I was sure she would be out and home again soon. When my mum told me she wouldn't be going home, I started to visit. The change was terrifying. I'd seen my grandma ill, she had breast cancer twice and beat it both times, but now she looked shrunken in, she barely recognised anyone and the nurses were being too kind, too soft-spoken. I'd just got home from school (1st of February 2010, 4.15pm) when mum called me to say she'd died, and I had to go pick my sister up from school and tell her the news. I can't remember how I broke it to her but I know I wasn't kind. My only excuse was that I now know that since having seizure the previous summer, I'd been suffering from severe depression but wouldn't be diagnosed until two months after my grandma died.  

She was comfortable and sleepy and loved when she died. I took the time off school to arrange the funeral and never went back. Helping with the funeral planning was cathartic. There's something very practical about people in the funeral and death certificate business. Closing all her accounts, settling debts, talking to the florist and drinking cups of tea whilst choosing a coffin helped in the process of letting go. I felt collected enough to view her body, but ended up being held onto by my two aunts, sobbing uncontrollably in the family room at the hospice that is meant for that kind of thing.  

The hilarity of the funeral, the vulcan death stare the vicar gave me when my sister announced too loud that I had refused to wear a cross, the same vicar's robes going missing, the wrong song being played... my grandma would have howled at our pitiful attempt to be formal. Clearing out grandma's house, tearing out and refitting the kitchen, writing "NICOLE IS A LOVE MACHINE" on the wall before repainting, spreading her ashes on a field and accidentally inhaling most of it when the wind blew the wrong way, it all helped me say goodbye to my grandma.   And I'm writing this now, just under five years later, because my other grandma, Thelma, has terminal liver and bowel cancer and there's nothing I, or anyone else, can do.  

I've known for a few months now, and whilst I'm relieved she chose to live it out as comfortably as she could rather than doing chemotherapy, and that the doctor seems to think she has a while left yet, this long, protracted way of going is in many ways crueller for those who have to watch it.   And selfishly I'm at a point now where big life events are about to happen and I want her to be there. And so the questions are, will she be at my graduation? Will I be able to tell her I've applied to another uni? Should I not tell her in case I don't get in? Have I got my last Christmas card from her? I didn't want to open it. My children are never going to meet her, and she's wonderful.  

Every time my mind takes me down a morbid path I have to tell myself over and over that I'm not the one that is dying, and that there is a time to grieve but it is not now, while she's still here and alive and kicking. And that she doesn't want us to be morose. The jokes my uncle makes about expiry dates when he takes my grandma shopping and the blasé way in which my mum refers to her illness makes me feel that I should have accepted it by now and not cringe whenever it is mentioned. And in many ways I have accepted it, and it is just part of the inevitable, but I'm still allowed to want my grandma to stay, surely? I'm sure jokes and blunt statements help them ease the process, but for me it just underlines the loss. I don't know how to deal with what I'm feeling. I don't know how to process this grief. I don't know how to show it. Right now I'm just bearing an unbearable thing, and making it bearable.

"If you're going through hell, keep going."