It’s Been a Long Week...

This is more of an update than anything, but I have some things to share.

My Nana passed away yesterday, February 2nd, around 4:30pm. As everyone who reads this newsletter knows, my Nana was one of the most important people in my life. While I will miss her immensely, she was suffering - and I am grateful that her final days were peaceful. I wanted to correct a typo as well - the original date of birth on the eulogy last night said 1963: she was actually born in 1931. In my grief and exhaustion, I accidentally typed my mother’s year of birth instead of my grandmother’s. Overall, 93 years of life is a nice, long blessing. May she rest in peace. Her memory will live on in me always.

I have also been sick for 2 weeks now. I am still recovering from an unknown virus that turned into a severe case of bronchitis. I seem to finally be on the mend, but I cannot express how exhausted I am of being ill. Of the last 4 months, I’ve been well less than 3 whole weeks. My body has been through the wringer, particularly my lungs, and I would love a reprieve.

We got a new puppy, which I will officially announce later today or tomorrow so that you may meet him, but for now it’s been exhausting. He’s only 8 weeks old, so he’s still very much a ‘baby’, requiring a lot of attention and care, particularly all through the night. I’m not sure if I’ll ever sleep again between the sickness and the dog, but maybe one day.

To be frank, I don’t know where to go from here. I have so many feelings. Losing my Nana was like losing a parent. The pain of that has been immense, but anticipated. I thought that knowing ahead of time would make it somehow easier. It hasn’t. This is the first time I’ve lost someone close to me, so I’m struggling through the newness of this grief. I also feel too, that I am in a little bit of shock still as well. It’s a bizarre place to be.

The hardest part has been hearing her referred to in the past tense. Dying seemed like such a natural process, and solution to her ails. Dying didn’t scare me for her. I still feel very peaceful about her spirit moving on from her frail body. It’s the part as though she was never here that rips at my insides. “She loved you,” my husband said last night after she was gone. The past tense of the word “loved” sliced me open, leaving me gasping for air.

No, there was no ‘loved’ I corrected him; she loves me still. Wherever she is, I must believe that she lives on and she loves me still. She was monumental; so if she was monumental, it can’t be that she would just slowly fade into obscurity, with only our memories bringing her back. That, I cannot accept. She is not past tense. Somewhere out there, she is still living on, and still loving.

Grief makes you sound like an insane person. It makes you feel as if you’re losing your mind, too. Reality seems to split today. There’s one reality where she is here, when for a brief moment I forget she died, and another where in my clarity, she is not. This duality of reality is a terror within itself. I think this may be a reflection of my shock. I’m hoping that as the days progress, the lack of her physical presence will “hit me” finally.

2024 was a challenging year for me. 2025 has shaped up to be just as difficult. I’m hoping that I’m getting the hard stuff out of the way now, in order to have room to usher in the new; the joys, the dreams, the living. I want this. I need this.

Thank you all for taking this wild ride with me. Life, I’ve learned, is defined through a series of human experiences. Essentially, it’s what you do that matters. BUT, a huge caveat to this is the fact that nothing really matters without the people in which you share these experiences with. The greatest experience of all, love, grows between us. It’s the people in our lives who make all the difference in our worlds. Thank you for being a part of mine.