What if, one day, suddenly your life changes before your eyes? What if you realize you will never be the same again? This is what happened to me when I lost my grandmother almost two years ago.

I remember it perfectly. It was an April evening during my eighth grade school year. Still chilly from winter, it was a day where I could just feel something wrong in the air. My intuition was working me to death, my stomach churning and writhing as if a live animal was trapped inside. I kept hoping against hope that this time my intuition was wrong.

I came home from school to find my father sitting outside alone on the back porch. This in itself showed that something was wrong; he has a night job and is never awake at 4:30 in the afternoon. He motioned me over with a sad look on his face and I took the seat in front of him, immediately sensing the sorrow in his eyes at how much pain this dreadful news was going to cause me.

“Ganny is dead,” was the first thing that came out of his mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

Right then and there I started to cry. My sweet, lovely grandmother had been struggling for the past week with some sort of disease and had finally given up.

My father, my brother, and I made a decision to start packing that night and leave for Pennsylvania in the morning so we could go to her funeral. We would travel by car and hopefully reach the town within two days, considering the long drive from the middle of Florida to my hometown in Lancaster. My mother, the daughter of my dear grandmother, had left in the middle of the night by plane to hopefully catch her before she got worse; but, unfortunately she didn’t make it in time.

The trip was awful, a long, tiring voyage, and other than the fact that it was long I can only remember grieving the entire way there. We didn’t reach my aunt’s house until around 10 at night two days after we left and I went to sleep almost immediately after unpacking, for we had to wake up early to make it to the funeral.

The morning of my grandma’s funeral was harshly cold compared to the heat that I am used to in Florida. I dressed all in black, in my best dress, heels, and even a lovely scarf. I wore the angel pin that she had given to me when I was little.

Arriving at the funeral home, I kept putting off going to get one last look at my grandmother’s face, for it was an open-casket funeral and I knew that as soon as I saw her I would burst into tears. Instead I conversed with relatives close to my grandmother like me, looked at pictures of her, and relived my many wonderful memories of her with others. But I could avoid it no longer; I had to go see my Ganny.

Sure enough, as soon as I got to the casket, I lost it. She looked gorgeous lying there, with her hair in white curls and her nails painted ruby, almost as if she were sleeping. I put my hand over her cold one and whispered “I love you” one last time before the service started, and kissed her goodbye on the forehead. Even though I was crying, I knew she was in a better place; after seven years of not being able to walk, she was finally able to sing and dance with the angels she so adored in heaven.

During the service you could tell my grandmother was loved by many people. She was indeed a beautiful person, lovely in her youth, very religious, and very caring. Though I never got to see her as often as I would have liked, she was still a large part of my life, and I felt an empty hole in my heart open that day that I had never experienced before.

As the pastor said Bible verses and expressed how much Nora was loved and adored, I thought of all of the memories I shared with her. This woman who taught me how to read when I was three, whom I went outside with to watch clouds and rainbows, was gone forever, at least in this life. I realized how much I would miss her, which made me cry even harder.

Before the casket was closed and we headed off to the cemetery, I gave her one last kiss on the cheek and told her one last time that I would miss her.

By the time we reached the graveyard, I was shaking with grief. The wind was biting at my back, whipping my hair around my face, as I walked up to my grandmother’s grave. Standing there in that cold, as the pastor said a final vow, I said my final goodbye to my grandmother. As the casket lowered and the crowd started to disperse, some stayed and threw flowers in along with her. I threw daisies after gently placing a lily, her favorite flower, on top of the elaborate funeral box. I was one of the last standing there,
praying to God to keep her safe and happy up in heaven.