She would have been 80 today...

My grandma was the best grandma in the world.  I'm pretty sure she was better than yours, although I don't really know yours and I guess if your grandma was Mother Theresa or something then maybe she would have been better than mine, but I kinda doubt it. 

My grandma was beyond awesome, she was my bestest best friend in the whole wide world, and even though she was a mother figure to me, we really were best friends. We went everywhere together, even when I was a baby she took me everywhere.  Kind of funny, a 50-something year old woman with a little baby in K-Mart, I  mean sure you see that every once in a while when a grandmother takes their grandchild to the mall, but we were there every single day.  At her funeral, someone came up to me and said "Oh you're the girl from the cart!" because grandma would drive me around in the shopping cart at the mall so much. 

She just meant the world to me, I can't imagine growing up without her. 

My grandma loved shopping, yelling at Pa, throwing things down the stairs at him, making fudge that was absolutely amazing, listening to Patsy Cline and Julio Iglesias, watching the Urban Peasant (who actually died a couple years ago, so she's probably kicking back and watching his cooking show live in heaven) and Wheel of Fortune, visiting her father in the nursing home (taking me with her of course) and talking on the phone to her friend "Vi". 

I remember falling asleep on the floor at the foot of her bed, listening to her talk to "Vi" on the phone.  They talked on the phone every single day, and even though I lived with my grandmother and we were together all the time, I never remember meeting "Vi".   These phone calls went on every night, no matter what, she always talked to "Vi" at the end of each day.  I can't imagine how "Vi" dealt with missing these phone calls once grandma got too sick to make them or after she had passed on. 

My grandma was never really a healthy person.  She had diabetes and got pneumonia a lot.  She was not always the nicest person either, often telling people where to go and how to get there very often if it meant sticking up for her family or what she believed in. 

When she got really sick, I was a teenager, going through that phase of not giving a shit.  I hadn't called her in weeks, maybe even months.  It was all about me and nobody else mattered.  Until she got sick.  She was in the hospital for quite a while, and for most of that time she was non responsive.  I remember the day I was told to sit with her and hold her hand by myself and say goodbye.  Little did I know, I would be doing the exact same thing with another person I loved seven years later. 

I sat beside her bed and stared at the IV in her hand and rubbed my thumb on her hand, back and forth over and over.  I had hoped she would have awakened, but she didn't.  I don't even know if she knew it was me. 

I never got to see her again, she was gone soon after that. 

Maybe I was supposed to be in the not giving a shit stage when she died, because I couldn't imagine being in the best friend stage and losing her.  Losing her when I apparently didn't give a shit was hard enough.  The thing that really gets me is that she wasn't supposed to die.  She wasn't old enough to be a grandmother.  I didn't get to love her long enough. All the things we missed out on together wasn't fair. 

She would have adored Mason. She would have taken him to the mall in her little shopping cart every single day and I would have let her, even though she would have been 80 today, she was a fighter and she would be safe with him.  I would have trusted her with my life. 

She has been gone for 11 years now, and it still makes me angry that she can't be here to be 80.  The world really needs more people here who were as good as she was.  It makes me mad that I can't go to her house and eat fudge and sell her Avon and gossip about her neighbours (who were always crazy).  It makes me mad that Mason can't try that fudge or her pancakes.  He will never get to see her place mat that was a foot off the table because she kept all her paperwork piled underneath it.  He will never go to her house and have to figure out how to pee on her ginormous toilet because she had the tallest toilet seat in the world. 

Happy Birthday to who would have been the bestest Great-Gramma in the world.  

PS - Please excuse the bad quality of the photo...I guess Kodak printers won't scan if you don't have colour ink.