It's Time Again

This note started as a true note to a friend. It has taken shape and evolved, so I post it here as a way of announcing my return.

I started a private Grief Book that grew into certain public sharing in the Grief Blog. After a point it became painful rather than cathartic to write. But I'm feeling it's time again. Thank you all who have stopped in, who have asked me to continue to write, who have offered their words of sympathy or kindness, who have honored me by sharing a bit of their own pain.

I lost my grandma, then a few months later we had the house fire (mom and I) then a little over a year later my grandpa (and really truly MY father too) died. We're approaching his anniversary as this year ends - we'll be doing the first thanksgiving without him, the first Christmas, just as we had to do all the awful firsts without my grandma. In truth, the seconds aren’t much better, they’re just different.

Before all of this I couldn't imagine how people got through when they lost both parents. If you're close to yours, there is no other pain like it.

The one year rule is shit (all the first are the worst and once you get through the first year it all gets better) People have very short time tables on what they will 'allow' from your grieving. Be warned. The thing to do is seek out others who understand and who can advise you honestly through the process. You do begin to learn to live your life without them - but with them in a kind of way, too. I think of my grandparents everyday of my life,

Sometimes when I don't want to have them, the memories come.

The old man pharmacist who works nights, Charlie, at CVS - every damn time I see him I cry. The good thing is it takes him long enough from the first time he comes to the window to the time he brings the prescriptions that I usually get it together… enough. I can't ever go into a Costco again because it is too much about the Wednesday shopping my grandpa did.

A song plays on the radio from ten years ago and my "Papa" flashes into my mind, laughing at the lyrics, eyes twinkling (the kind of song he'd call 'red ass music' - yes very pc - actually he loved a lot of country music) on the trip my mom, my Papa and I took to Asheville, NC. It was the last WWII reunion he ever made. Then I think of all of his friends that are gone, men I knew only slightly but loved much. The list for Taps grows exceedingly long.

My grandma served, thinking she might end up close to my grandpa. Instead, she “fought the battle of Reno” training pilots on instruments to fly over the China Burma hump. I never saw her meddles till she had died.

I wonder who will be there this year at the 3rd Armored Division Reunion (Third Armored, First Army is the army of General Rose and General Omar Bradley NOT Patton. Patton was Third Army.) It always used to steam my grandpa when Patton, who he thought was an ass, would get credit for 3rd armored victories through the 60+ years since D-Day.

I can hear Papa over my shoulder telling me to make the point, NOW, to clear up the record, to say THEY were the boys on the beaches of Normandy, in Sainte Mere Eglise, in Caan, in Saint Lo, France in Vervier, Belgium where he got stranded with ten men during the Bulge, when the whole damn thing fell apart during Hitler’s last desperate attempt to wrestle victory from the jaws of defeat. It nearly cost my grandpa his life.

His youngest brother, Jim, died parachuting over the Rhine River. His cousin Emerson Kazinski died overseas, too. After the war was over, the family had their bodies sent home to receive final burial in the rich, flat loam of Southern Illinois. Minonk to be exact. Too many boys and too many bodies from that one small town. Too many gold star mothers.

In Vervier, nobody knew where the Nazi’s were (merely close) or how soon, how many, or when they would be back. Papa got lucky when a member of the underground approached him as he tried to ‘make contact’ in a little tavern. He trusted his instincts and the man who approached him.

He and his men hid for ten days in a small, cramped wine cellar. Hitler’s final victory didn’t happen anywhere, certainly not in Vervier. The townsfolk gave up their rations to keep the men alive. In return, my grandpa promised the couple, in whose wine cellar they hid, that he would do anything he could for them for the rest of his life. He kept his word.

A few years post war, he and my grandma sponsored the couple when they wanted to come to America. My grandparents brought them into their own small home. Thus Celine and Pascal Grosjean became “Aunt Sally and Uncle Pascal” to my mom who toddled about picking up bits of English, Polish and French from parents, grandparents, and Belgian “relatives.” All in one little house with one even smaller bathroom.

And I’m back in the present – wiping my eyes as I run in for my luncheon carry out. The reunion wasn’t that many years ago: seven to be exact. It was almost this same time of year. I was dubbed “the twenty one year old” by all the men (those I didn’t already know). I became everyone’s grand-daughter. I danced with them, laughed with them, heard some of the stories their own grandchildren might never have had the honor to hear.

I don’t mean to neglect the women, who were equally amazing, but that’s another story.

This is the way of grief: It has no time limit, but is it mutable. It does get easier. In many ways, it depends on where the day takes you, how it changes and evolves.

Cherish your parents for as long as you have them, your family. Don't even try to prepare for when they are gone: nobody's ever ready for the reality.

A lot of people won't understand you, but then a lot of people might not love as deeply as you either.

Cry. You will. Don’t be afraid of it. And sometimes you’ll cry for no reason just because you’ll miss and want the people who’ve gone the way I miss and want my grandparents.


Ultimately, I think I would've gone and stayed mad without my faith. Prayer helps and faith sustains through the madness of it all, through the darkness of it all. I hope I haven't said too much. It's not to scare you. You will bare through it.

Rent the movie, “Shadowlands.” Maybe that's a good preparation. I remember seeing it years ago and there is a line I repeated over and over to myself all these years later. The movie is based on CS Lewis’s own writing about his late-in-life marriage to Joy who had terminal cancer when they married. She stayed with him a few precious years and taught him how to love.

Paraphrased from C.S. Lewis and Shadowlands, “The depth of the love now, will be the depth of the sorrow later.” IF that is true, the mourning is a kind of a payment, a tribute to the one who has gone before. Let it be that. Grieve with all that is in you come the time.