Until we meet again, my dear sweet friend

MaMa has died and I am sad. There is a chance by the end of this post, I won’t be as sad... but right now, I am sad. For those of you new to this blog, MaMa is my grandmother on my Dad’s side of the family... and she was my best friend. Don’t misunderstand me, I’ve got the best friends in the world and I’ve got the best family in the world... so to say she was my best friend is not a slight to anyone else as much as it is a credit to how close we were. (For any of you thinking about The Wife, I would like to point out that when we married we became one so to be best friends with her would be like being best friends with myself and that’s just weird). I can’t say this death took my by surprise. Let’s face it, she was 95 and hadn’t been in the greatest of health lately but it’s still hard to lose someone you love so much. But why focus on the bad? She lived a good life. She lived a long life. Honestly, it was longer than she wanted (but not as long as I wanted... so I guess we can call it even). Like my friend Meg, MaMa was part of the Greatest Generation. She lived through the Great Depression (fyi, she told me it wasn’t all that great) and WWII. She had a son serve in Vietnam (hardest time of her life, I was told). She had two sons but she always told people she had 3 (with my grandfather being the third). If my math is right, I believe she was 9 years younger than my grandfather. There was a time when I thought that was a pretty wide gap (at least until September 10, 2005... then I realized 9 years isn’t that much of an age difference after all).

She was my protector when I was growing up. I always knew she would take my side... but that doesn’t mean she would let me get away with everything. There were times she would scold me. But there was a huge difference between MaMa scolding me and Mom and/or Dad scolding me. Out of all her grandchildren, I’ve always considered myself the luckiest because (I’m pretty sure) I got to spend more time with MaMa than any of the others. I would drive her up to her hometown of Branchville so we could visit her brothers. She loved Branchville and always told me how my grandfather had promised that they could move there after the war was over. He told her this back in 1943 when they bought a house… the house she died in this past Sunday.

I’m going to be posting more about her in the coming days. I was given a chance to speak at the funeral (something I will be forever grateful for). Tomorrow, I plan to post my notes from my talk.