A couple of months ago, I was asked to do something that I never thought I'd have to do...write my grandmother's obituary. I agreed, because my grandfather had asked, and he's never asked anything of me. I felt like it was the one thing that I could give to them, to show how much they meant to me.
So I said yes. I didn't know where to start, and I really didn't know if I was ever really going to be able to do her justice.
I was relieved when she started showing great signs of improvement before I could actually start writing, and I allowed myself to believe that I was somehow going to escape the task. Somehow, I allowed myself to believe that maybe she would be around forever. Maybe she would be herself again one day.
Maybe.
Maybe didn't happen, and she started to go back downhill. So again I was asked to write her obituary, but this time I knew I would have to see it through to completion. So I wrote it, with every ounce of emotional energy I could focus, hoping that I would be able to capture her, to convey the love and the spirit of my grandmother. It was so hard to reduce her existence to such a small space of words, to confine what she meant to so many people in such a tiny boxed space. To boil her down to black and white print when she had always been such a vibrant woman.
She was truly a beautiful woman, even though she never felt it. She was my Grammie, and I hope that I paid her proper tribute.
I'll always love you, Ricki Lindstrom.
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