No cliffhangers

I've been reading a lot of blogs recently, and some of them have a common characteristic that drives me nuts. Either the author talks about something that's going to happen in the near future and promises a follow-up that never comes, or refers to something in the past that wasn't discussed in the blog, and there ends up being a gap in the narrative. Of course, I only really notice it when I've discovered a new blog and am reading several months of entries at a time catching up on a stranger's story.

For some reason this bothers me. So, on the off chance that someone's reading this post in 2011 and is wondering why it's been a month and I haven't posted about my grandma again, I guess I should suck it up and deal with it now. After my last post, I really needed to post a follow-up, and I wasn't sure how.

My grandma passed away February 18. She lived a long life, and I hope it was a happy life. I know she appreciated having her family around her in her last days, but she was ready to go. Her health had failed her, and her quality of life was completely gone. We were ready to say goodbye, and she died peacefully in her sleep, which is all any of us can really ask for.

I had a complicated relationship with my grandma. We shared the same name, but we were never particularly close. Or, I should say, we were as close as we could be given her personality. She had trouble showing or telling the people close to her that she loved them. I truly believe she did love me, it was just hard growing up without the cookie-baking, book-reading, coming-to-your-school-play kind of grandma.

(Sidenote: My other grandmother was actually cruel in a mentally unhealthy kind of way, so I was a little lacking in the grandparent department growing up. Both of my grandfathers died before I was old enough to remember them.)

So, grandma was the closest I came to having a real "grandparent/grandchild" relationship, and sometimes it hurt. For example, she didn't come to my wedding. She had a hundred excuses, but I'm firmly convinced that she didn't come because:

a) I was marrying a (whisper) Catholic! (Who was Divorced! With a CHILD!)
b) I wasn't getting married in a church.
c) I had the audacity to have alcohol at my reception.

I was her youngest of three grandchildren, and she didn't come to my wedding. She never met my husband. Or my gorgeous stepdaughter.

But I tried really hard to let go of all of this when I went to see her the weekend before she died. I mean, when you're hugging your dying grandmother, it seems kind of petty to hold grudges about something that happened almost five years ago.

She told me she loved me the last time I saw her. I guess I just have to hold on to that.