Not so normal

My grandmother passed away last week as many of you saw on the blog. Nothing has really felt normal since and I don't know when it will. It's true - all of the praying and meditation and vitamins in a day can't prepare you for the death of a loved one. Especially, an unexpected death. I know it is pretty not-cool to talk about death on a blog full of pictures of smiling children but I think there is a sweetness in her passing that I am clinging to right now and I couldn't miss writing about it.

My Mawmaw, my mother's mom, and a mom to six other daughters, was self-less. This had to be written with a hyphen for the emphasis.....she cared most about others - not about her self. She literally lived to make other people smile. Last Friday my mama wanted me to take the boys to Mawmaw's pool to swim but as they often do, the boys naps thwarted any of our plans. Of course today I despise that I let the naps of my babies interfere with the last time I could have spent with my grandmother. I now have an answer to one of my biggest regrets. I had just literally been too busy and too exhausted lately to make the effort to visit anyone - even the long overdo dentist, and in this season of life I had sort of thought that the rest of life would wait for me to catch up. You know, wait for me to get back to normal sleep and wait for me to feel good again. And for a long while life seemed to be just standing still for me. I had just told Brad that I felt like my feet were in quick sand and I was watching as friends and family around me graduated, got engaged, started a business, or even more close to home - were healed from an ailing sickness. All the while, life wasn't waiting for me as I had thought. My grandmother, for one, was experiencing the joy she had created through her many grandchildren and through pleasing the people around her despite how she may have felt on the inside. She made three cakes last Wednesday on the day that will now be put on the other end of her hash mark. She literally squeezed every ounce of life and joy out of each day and she lived like it may be her last....even on a seemingly normal Wednesday.

If for some reason my day was today I would be appalled at the things I left behind that day....certainly not cakes! Anyway, there is a sweetness about her life that is all around me right now and it is so refreshing amidst such loss.

There is a for sale sign in our front yard right now. I have yet another doctor appointment tonight - number 14. Our boys are only getting farther away from being babies and there are letters I want to write and things I need to do in order to take care of my family tomorrow but for right now I just want to enjoy the sweetness. Mawmaw's passing has allowed me to be okay with life passing me by. I feel as if time has stopped for everyone who knew her and we will all just catch up sometime down the road....but that's okay. Now is the time to remember and to store away the lingering taste of her chocolate pound cake and the beautiful memories of her last months on earth among so many friends and family.

I am grateful for this "not so normal" time. I am thankful to really feel sadness for my mother and her sisters and for all of us whom grieve the loss of her earthly life. Life sometimes seems too much about the things to get done during the day and while alot of that is just the reality of having two young ones - I don't want to live that way. It's too frustrating to live that way. Nothing will ever be fully done but there will always be invaluable conversations and embraces that we have all been a part of each day....none of which were part of a to-do list. I am just so glad that I have enough of those to keep my mind drifting from one memory to the next during this time.

And I am grateful, too, for smiles like the one below. Life is a full circle. My mawmaw in her 70's knew just how to make a little child smile. I think she got it. She knew there was a richness to life and it wasn't found in doing a certain amount of things each day but more about enjoying enough people each day and relishing in the smile of a little child or even a grown daughter. Our boys are lucky to have four grandparents to make the same impact that my Mawmaw made on me. Life really is a circle....with a cloud of "sweetness" around it if we can slow down enough to take it all in.