December 8: Moment of peace. An hour or a day or a week of solitude. What was the quality of your breath? The state of your mind? How did you get there?
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My entry for this one covers not quite a moment of solitude, but instead a peaceful moment that I really needed to share with the people I love. I don’t know how many of you have been able to experience death when it “happens.” I have. As I wrote on my blog about four hours after my grandmother died, “I gasped and then yelled and ran out of the room. I crawled into a corner and started to hyperventilate. I’ve never felt like that before. Once I finally calmed down, I felt so much relief. Her pain was gone.”

I mean what I said about relief.

The two hours I spent in the hospital room were stressful. I cried so much that I ran out of tears. I got angry at selfish family members. I looked at my dad and hoped that, for once, I’d be able to comprehend what was going on in his head. My step-grandpa left about four minutes before she died, and once she left my dad ran to get him. He walked in slowly on his walker and said, “Is she gone?” We nodded and he screamed “PUDDIN’!” and collapsed in a chair next to her bed, sobbing. My dad cried (and I’ve only seen him cry twice before) and whispered,  “I’ve lost my best friend.” In the middle of all of this, I had the most intense panic attack of my life. It was like something out of a movie— but hey, I come from a family of actors and we do drama right.

Once the room cleared out and my wonderful great-aunt Ann made the arrangements to have her body taken to the funeral home, I sat in the room with my Mee-Maw and my dad, his sisters, my mom and my sister. And we just sat, in silence and looked at her. My grandmother had been slowly suffering for the last two years of her life and we all knew. And it was finally over. My head was clear. And (especially after the two most intense and painful hours of my life) I just appreciated the quiet and the peace and the amount of love in that room. And the relief. We just sat, waiting and breathing, with heads on each other’s shoulders and hands squeezing each other’s hands. And we loved.

I swore back in August (or was it September?) that I wouldn’t make this blog about my dead grandmother.

Well…tough. One more post. You can take it.

Today, I was scrolling down my cell’s phonebook to retrieve Mark’s number for a vendor when I came across this: “MeeMaw- 205-980-3493.”

Not the first time I’ve seen it since August 10th. It gives me chills every time I see it. And yet, I can’t bring myself to delete it.

That number hasn’t even worked for her since she moved into her “assisted living facility” well over a year ago (she was a popular woman, so I often wonder about the poor soul who has this number now and probably also has this line on his or her answering machine: “And if you’re looking for Luddy/Mary Lou, SHE’S NOT HERE!”). The other number I have for her is written down on a piece of paper with her name crossed out, BUS (my step-grandpa’s name) written in its place, and sits on my chest of drawers. I look at it every now and then and say, “DAMMIT I have to call him!” (I am a terrible person and haven’t called him since August. Thinking about it makes me cry.)

But I can’t delete this number. And so it will sit. Sit in my phonebook until I lose or destroy my SIM Card.

Or maybe when I realize that having her old number in my phonebook is not going to bring her back.