I woke up at 4am on Thanksgiving morning and expected to hear the sound of her footsteps down the hall.
I could almost swear I could smell the turkey baking. And waves of country stuffing almost certainly filled the air.
There was an instinct inside of me to turn on Nick at Nite. To find some old I Love Lucy reruns. Or maybe the Mary Tyler Moore show. I fought the urge to grab two golden delicious apples and a paring knife, and watch her peel them into long curlie cues while we talked for hours. Because it was the early hours of Thanksgiving morning, and this is what we always did.
But it was somewhere in the darkness, somewhere in that threshold where wake eclipses sleep..that I realized that she wasn't there. That her footsteps weren't coming any closer. And my heart ached out her absence just a little bit more.
There are days that I miss my Grandma Goldie so much that it hurts. And then there are times that I'll go days without realizing that she's gone. Days when I reach for the phone to give her a call before I catch myself . What they don't tell you about loss is that it hits you in waves. Over and over again. Because it is on those days when you almost forget, when the pain seems like it has finally started to fade, that it comes rushing back down on you and hits like the first time. Thanksgiving, the day that was always our day...is always one of those days.
I fell back into a fitful sleep, and when I woke the next morning I made Justin promise me that he'd hug his own Grammie extra tight this year. That he'd listen to as many stories as she would tell, and that he'd burn her smile into his memory. He promised to do me one better, and he packed the camera in the car alongside my Grandma Goldie's famous stuffing.
These are just a few of our favorites of what he got of Miss Grammy and her cat, Nicholas. I post these because she's adorable and we love her (even if her cat does look like he's plotting to take over the world! :) But I also post these because I also want to encourage each and everyone of you out there.....you know all those people in your life that you've been meaning to take pictures of? That you've been promising yourself you would schedule a quick photo shoot with? Do it. The holidays are coming up, you're probably going to see them. Make a plan for it now, and pack the camera along with the presents.
Because I have a feeling, those picture will become the most important gift of all.
Life with J&M
