I'll sing you to sleep.

About a year ago, I returned home to California. My visit was not a happy one - my grandmother was dying, and the family had convened from all over the country to come say goodbye. I had a hard time with all of this - in particular, seeing my dad's face the day she finally passed away, a mere two hours before my flight home to Arizona.

I did not visit her in the hospital - she was in pain, literally wasting away down to skin and bones, delirious - and I still don't feel good about that. I thought long and hard about the decision to abstain from seeing her, and I think it was the correct choice; the correct choice is usually the hardest one to make, or so I've been told. I choose to remember the good memories, of my grandma laughing, probably at something terribly inappropriate in a public place.

She was a difficult woman to deal with, oh, let's say 90% of the time. My mother and I knew this better than most - we both spent plenty of time with her in her final years, giving her rides to bingo and doing yardwork, making sure she took her insulin, etc. She was something of a mean woman, with an obstinate attitude and some lingering racism, who lived by the idea that nobody would ever tell her what to do, even if failing to follow the advice would ultimately kill her. I have to say, despite how completely stupid and incorrect that mindset was, I respected it then and I still do. I wish she would have fucking listened to the doctors, though.

Anyway, I put on this song the day she died and I cried drunk tears on an airplane. 

We all have people in our lives who will hurt us, that's a given. Sometimes we don't love these people, and sometimes we do. I loved my grandma very much, despite all the crazy bullshit she put us through for most of my life, and when she died, it felt like a skyscraper collapsed in my chest. This was real. This was another injury my grandma dealt me, and her sons, and her grandchildren. We all knew the craziness intimately, but we all also knew that we would miss her forever. 

That was about a year ago - I have forgotten the precise date. I don't memorialize death dates. I do, however, stand by matters of the heart, and my heart still misses my grandma Bev.

Fuck, I'm fucking crying again.

The people you love, make sure they know it. 

-MJ