love fiercely

The colors are still brilliant.  The stars overhead are bright, the sun shined today and left a pink reminder at day's end that everything will be alright.  But...my sweet dear Grandma passed yesterday and even though her life was long and sometimes good, I don't quite know where to put my heart.  She's been with me since the day I was born.  She, the eagle in human form would die, of course- we all do.  But it was her dying, her slow limbo like dance between here and there that really got me.  I found myself praying that she'd just go, so she wouldn't suffer and yet- did she or do I?  It's awful hard to let people go, and it's even harder to feel it.  I think I'm fighting the feeling, I'm on here tonight with dinner dishes still stacked in the sink.  Apple sauce waiting to be finished, laundry and travel arrangements, a scanner that won't scan the most beautiful pic I could find of her for the obituary because the printer is shy of one cartridge which I don't even need- I just want to scan.  Dammit.

I will say that I miss her, will miss her even more- will miss that one voice of wisdom that I could count on.  That one wobbly way of standing as she did.  Her voice, her handwriting even...I pulled out an old card, looking for that elusive photo and her handwriting was on it.  Precise.  Upright and as plain as it gets and yet, the quality of the way she signed her name will never be again.  I am lost without my grandma, I haven't held her hand in so many years and yet right now, if only she could take mine and steer a bit, well...my mind seems flooded with images.  All the stories of all the moments ever in my life, included her.  I wish for the world then, a grandma like that.  One who never pretended to know all the answers, one who often encouraged me to simply forget and go on.  One who never hardly ever cried but when she did, it broke your heart into a million little pieces that could not be put back together until she gathered herself up and went on.  She knew that, could see that so she always held together...for us.
I'm an orphan.  A forty nine year old orphan and I want my Mocko...she'd just cluck at me.  Roll those brown piercing eyes and run that forget it line by me again.  She'd probably offer me candy, a pink peppermint tablet or a chocolate star.  She wouldn't have much to say, she always just was...I could count on her just was.  And now she just was was...sounds like a pity party going on here.  Dammit.

Tell me grown up orphans left to fend for yourself, do you feel this way- did you feel this way at a later age and thought you'd handle it better?  For gosh sakes, she was ninety something- she couldn't live forever.  A part of me, the innocent dot of me- very well thought she could.  I guess I have to convince myself that tomorrow I'll rally and all will be well.  That grandma flew to where grandma's fly and gather up all the lost loved ones left before...and I'll think of her smiling and maybe she stands again tall and straight, voluptuous and lovely, kicking up her heels in a hell bent for heaven polka.  Oh I hope so,  I hope she joined with a certain young man that I'll miss forever and said-

"She needs us now, sure hope she settles down enough that we might get through in some pink way..."

Maybe, oh maybe that was her smile in the sunset.  And maybe I won't cry anymore and be so damn bitchy.  Maybe I'll quit licking my wounds and go out and greet the world again.  I've been avoiding it and it doesn't stop you know, not for me or you or Grandma Mocko's passing.
It should though, it really should.  She was something and this world hardly knew her, that's the saddest part of all.  Folks like her, plain and hardworking, soft spoken and private, never meddling yet always ready to steady you.  She knew her mettle but she never boasted about the fact that she could kick any body's butt that needed it and she would if it would help them, otherwise- she didn't trouble.  Humble and proud in an old lady way.  Wore Mocha Red lipstick every day that I knew her...looked this side of seventy and still blushed.
Surrounded herself with things I thought, but those things I see now- were gifts bestowed on a good lady who never wanted for much and rarely purchased a thing for herself except the occasional cookie.
Off she goes then, out of sight.  And I can only reach her now, backwards through thought and memories.

I'll tell you finally then, this.  It doesn't matter how old or young they are when they die, they're just as gone and they take a whole lot of you with them; it empties places in you that will remain so unless you fill them again with the stuff that shaped you.  And that's the hardest part because those who love fiercely give it freely and over fill us.  There's always more and you never even once had to ask for it- you see that clearly the unclearer they get.  Best I can do is be like that to those I love, fill them up overflowing- like she did.
She wasn't a praying woman.  She just accepted everything, pure faith.
Damn.   I wished I would have asked her about that.