Thank You, God, for the Years We Had Her

We lost my grandmother recently. I still don't have a clean way to say it. Something that was always holding the house up is not there anymore, and the whole place feels different.

She was the strongest person I have known. She raised her children on her own, at a time when giving up would have been understandable. She never talked about how hard it was. She got up every morning and did what the day asked of her. When her children had children, she loved us the way she loved them. Completely. Nothing held back.

I thank God for her life. For the ordinary mornings as much as the hard years. For what she brought into this family simply by being in the room with us.

She Lived By Her Principles

She gave quietly. Not from what was left over at the end of the month, but from whatever she had in her hands that day. She never waited to be asked properly. If she saw someone in need, she moved.

She was honest, and she was disciplined. Both together in one person is rare. Honesty on its own can turn hard. Discipline on its own can turn cold. In her they sat together easily. She kept her word. She kept her days in a simple order that somehow made room for everyone else.

And she was brave when it mattered. Never loud about it. She made the difficult choice when it was the right one, even when she was the one who paid for it. That stayed with me more than anything she ever told me.

I didn't learn any of this from her advice. I learned it from watching her.

Grief Doesn't Come With Instructions

Everyone gets through this differently. Some people need to talk. Some need somebody sitting next to them. Some need a quiet room and nobody asking how they are doing. Some need all of it, on different days. There is no right way. There is only whatever gets you to the end of the day still standing.

I live in my head. I take a thought and turn it over and over until it wears thin. Most days that habit works for me. In grief it works against me. The mind keeps going back into the same empty rooms, asking questions nobody can answer.

Work helps. I love what I do, and when I go deep into it my mind has somewhere else to be. It isn't that I forget her. It's that I stop circling.

Driving helps too. When I was young I heard a doctor tell a relative who had just lost her husband that driving uses every one of your senses at once. You watch the road. You check your mirrors. You read the traffic. You feel the car under you. You cannot be anywhere except where you are. That has stayed with me ever since. Behind the wheel the noise in my head goes quiet, because there is no space left for it.

None of this fixes anything. It keeps me from sinking into my own thoughts. On the hardest days that has mattered more than I expected.

I Keep Thanking God for Her

I don't want to turn her into a list of good qualities. She was a real person. She got tired. She could be stubborn. She loved us in small, repeated ways that you don't notice until the house goes quiet.

I keep thanking God for her. For the strength it took to raise her children alone. For the way she loved her grandchildren as fully as she loved her own. For her honesty and her discipline. For the courage to do the right thing when it cost her.

None of that left with her. I feel it every time I try to live the way she lived. Not perfectly. But deliberately.

The missing is still heavy. Some days work and the road are enough to carry it. Some days they are not. She knew what it was to keep going when the road gave her nothing back. Remembering that is what keeps me going now.