I've spent most of the past 24 hours with my mom. Sometimes I think I spend too much time over there, and maybe I do, but for now I don't care. I keep thinking about when people die and how they are gone for good, and after someone dies how you would just give anything to spend that extra 15 minutes or whatever just talking to her, or watching TV with her, or just knowing that she is alive.
I never knew my grandfather very well. I think my clearest memory of him is when we visited him at the house he and my grandma moved to after they left the farm. I remember him in the backyard, going into the tool shed to get something. The backyard used to be so beautiful- it had pecan trees, and beautiful roses. The grass used to be very plush and my sisters and I would do cartwheels on it. Being so young, I didn't think much about my grandpa being sick and that someday I would be sad that I never really knew him, never really had a chance to experience who he was. I was eight years old and I remember being at the hospital disgusted that I wasn't old enough to go visit my grandpa, not really because I wanted to see him, just that I couldn't and I had to wait with my sisters in the waiting room. The last year or so of his life he was so sick that he was in the hospital constantly, and we rarely saw him. Even before that, he had taken a bad fall down some stairs which made him not himself.
There is a picture of him holding me in his lap, taken at some family party when I was four years old. Of course I don't really remember that time at all. My grandpa loved me a whole lot when I was a kid, and there is something very comforting about that.