My senior year of high school had gone by in an instant. I had applied, auditioned, gotten into a few colleges and I chosen the college I would spend four years at. Throughout all of this madness, I never expected to not have my grandmother around for my graduation.
I had been studying for my AP Literature exam and the day had finally arrived. During the studying period my grandmother had been admitted to hospice care and I had spent as much time there as I could with school and extracurriculars going on. The day of the test I went to school, took my test and immediately after I was done I jumped in the car and headed back to the nursing home. The whole experience felt like a blur. Everyone was crying or laughing, a strange opposition of emotions. Family would cry by my grandmother’s bedside or sit in the lobby, drinking a generic brand can of soda, laughing about how funny she used to be.
My grandmother died on Mother’s Day in 2014. Losing her was unlike anything I had felt before in my then 17 years of life. I look back on the memories I shared with her; playing with her vintage Barbie Dolls, going to see "The Lizzie McGuire Movie" in theaters, the one time she bought me gel pens (I was so cool because I had a 24 pack of gel pens), or the multitudes of sleepovers on her futon in her apartment. A few years before her death my grandmother had a stroke. It broke my heart. I didn’t realize that she would never be the same.
The thing about Alzheimer’s Disease is that you lose the person you love long before they die. I lost the woman who would crack jokes and smile all the time and wear red hats. Not only did I lose her, but my mother lost her. The effects of my grandmother’s illness on my mother were devastating. My mother would go to the nursing home at least twice a week. She would go and do her laundry as to keep my grandmother’s beautiful clothes that she took so much pride in from falling apart. My mother would come home from these visits and sob because she knew she was losing her. Losing her to Alzheimer’s was the longest period of mourning you could imagine.
I didn't expect to feel any resentment toward the situation in the months following her death. I cried out of anger that other kids got to have their grandmother sitting in the audience for graduation and I didn't. I was furious that other girls would get to look out into the crowd at their wedding and see their grandmother smiling back at them. I remember this sensation most because I had never felt anything like it. I understood that she didn't die to hurt me. It still hurt though. For months I felt stuck in this state of frustration. As time went forward and I started college I came to terms with her absence in my life. I began to understand that if I do get married one day and I look out into the crowd and she's not there to not despair in my loneliness, but to smile knowing she'll always be with me.
