Hard to wrap my mind around it.

Oh, what a strange, sad, stressful few weeks it's been. I know I've been completely neglecting this blog, because so much has been going on. It's funny because I have ALOT of thoughts about everything, but no time or patience to sit down and put my thoughts into words. I've tried to sit down and write this post four times now, but my mind just doesn't seem to be able to do it.


TH's mother passed away a week ago, following a long slow progressive illness that suddenly worsened at the beginning of March. In some ways I guess you could say we "knew" this day was coming -- we knew it was coming a few weeks ago when the doctor called from the hospital in Georgia and told TH, "If this was my mother, I would come down here immediately." We knew it was coming a few months ago when we went home for Thanksgiving and TH's mom was hospitalized the entire time (10 days), discharged on Thanksgiving Day. We knew it was coming almost 8 years ago, the day after our wedding, when she first had signs of a heart problem and spent the day in the ER with mild chest pains and a swollen arm.

Knowing it's coming, and actually facing it when the time finally does come are two different things.

It's so weird to think that we're getting to the age where it's surprising, but not completely unheard of, to lose a parent. It's so weird to think that our kids are only almost-4 and 6 months old and one of their grandparents is already gone. I've known TH since high school, so it's weird to think that I'll never talk to his mother again, someone I've known for almost 20 years. It's unbelievably hard for me to wrap my mind around, so I can only imagine what TH is going through.

Losing TH's mom has made us think alot about our own mortality. It's a huge reminder that we're not going to be here forever. What is like, to say goodbye to your children? To hold your new grandbaby and know that you'll likely never see that child grow up? Jr. only met his grandmother once, in the hospital at Thanksgiving, when he was 8 weeks old. J knows who she is, he talked to her on the phone almost every day, but eventually those memories will fade. That's what is really hard, realizing that someone who had so much influence on our lives will be completely unknown to our children. It's funny how you don't understand until you're a parent that your own parents had whole entire lives before you were born that you didn't know anything about and that had nothing to do with you. It's just sad to think that our kids' grandmother is part of the life that they'll never know, a person they'll hear alot about but never experience.

We've also been faced with trying to explain this whole situation to J. Unfortunately we already had to start this conversation with him when TH's grandmother died in December. (What a terrible year for TH's family, grandmother and mother just 3 months apart.) It's so hard to know what J understands. He knows who his grandmother was, but he doesn't quite get what her relationship was to TH, and looks confused when we say that "Daddy is sad because he'll never see his mommy again." He keeps asking questions that are impossible to answer. Why did she get sick? Why did she die? Where did she go? When will we see her again? The other day he was playing with his Little People airport and told me that the people on the plane were "going down to Georgia because their grandmas died a little bit." I hate to think that because of TH being away alot the last couple of months, J now associates going on the plane with someone dying or going to a funeral.

This is the dark part of life, I guess. We just thought that we would be lucky and have alot more years before we'd have to say goodbye to one of our parents...