Thoughts

My paternal grandmother passed away last night from cancer. She lived in Florida all my life and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever seen her. You could say, without exaggeration, that we were not close.

Gram is the grandmother that walked away from her family of six children when my dad was (I believe) in high school, so the relationship between her and the rest of the family was always strange, and always difficult. She was the kind of grandmother that you didn’t develop intimacy with, who was just as enigmatic as people named Cher or Prince – familiar enough to be called a single, one-syllable name, but so distant as to remain a question mark on the family tree. I really didn’t know her at all, and I can’t say that she knew me either.

Gram remembered my birthday because I was born the year that she vacationed in Germany. Yet if you were to collect all of her grandchildren into one place, she probably couldn’t differentiate one from the other.

Yet I never felt a lack in my life because my grandmother wasn’t there. She just wasn’t. No harm, no foul – things happen; people lead different lives; not all families must be close. So with her death, I don’t feel much personal loss.

However, at the same time, I feel genuinely saddened by her passing. Cancer is a horrible, horrible disease that I would not wish on anyone. And I am sure that she developed close bonds with other people in her life, who are devastated by their loss.