There’s an old Counting Crows song called A Long December, a song about looking back on a rough year that you can only understand once you get through it.
I hadn’t thought about that song in a long time.
I was already planning to write about grief this week; the sheer amount of loss this year has made it pretty hard to ignore.
But grief has a way of getting to you when you least expect it.
Grief is different for everyone, but there’s always that same rude awakening when your world stops and the actual world doesn’t.
Businesses stay open, people go about their day, and you realize you’re stuck in one of the worst seasons of your life - alone.
It creates this simmering, irrational anger that isn’t even about other people at all, but the fact that something devastating just occurred, and the world didn’t stop to acknowledge it.
And you think to yourself, “How can this be? Does nobody else feel this? Don’t they know what just happened?”
You know that they don't actually know, but it feels like they should.
I remember that feeling well.
Years ago, I lost the person I was closest to at that time in my life: my grandmother.
She was the center of our family. The mediator, the peacekeeper. She was the glue that held the family together and the one we all went to when times were tough.
During this particular period, I was living with my grandparents again after my marriage collapsed and left me financially ruined.
Grandma was a vibrant, energetic woman with the usual ‘old age’ complaints, but by late summer of 2011, she seemed tired and occasionally complained of headaches, chalking it up to getting older.
At first, that made sense. But soon her entire personality changed, and she became irritable and withdrawn.
I have a vivid memory of one particularly beautiful day in September: she was slumped at her dining room table, sunlight streaming in, her head in her hands, looking defeated.
None of this was like her at all, and that was the moment I knew something was wrong.
She saw doctors but made my grandfather and me promise not to breathe a word to anyone, especially her children. No doctor could pinpoint what was wrong, and she didn’t want anyone worrying about her.
Of course she didn't.
But as her health continued to deteriorate, neither of us could deny what we were seeing. With my grandfather’s permission, I told the rest of the family.
It went about how you’d expect.
Not long after, she was rushed to the hospital, where in the ER, scans revealed the cause of everything: a brain tumor that was bleeding and causing swelling.
Five-plus hours of surgery later, the doctors told us they'd removed as much of the tumor as they could.
Then they told us what it was: glioblastoma - aggressive and terminal.
Hearing the word “terminal” instantly changes everything. There’s just no easing into that.
Before her surgery, the doctors had asked her who should make decisions for her, and my grandmother chose me. I don't believe it was symbolic; I think she chose me for practical reasons.
At the time, I was in my thirties, a single mother, and suddenly her medical proxy. I knew next to nothing about this disease, and I didn't have the benefit of prior experience or guidance.
But my grandmother knew her family well; her husband and children loved her fiercely. She didn't need someone who 'loved her the most'. She asked for someone who could push past that when tough decisions had to be made.
And it changed everything.
I was told by someone outside the family that it was a death sentence, and the kindest thing possible would be to take her home and let her live whatever time she had on her own terms.
I tried to stop the treatment plan and argued against dragging her through pointless interventions. My mother supported that completely.
But my grandfather and others in the family wanted to pursue treatment, and I found myself stuck in a no-win situation.
If I pushed hard, I was "already giving up on her". If I held back, I wasn't doing the job she had entrusted to me.
I didn't yet understand the disease well enough to know, with absolute certainty, how hopeless it truly was. I knew it was terminal. What I didn’t understand was how fast it would actually take her.
In hindsight, I was making decisions under pressure, without a clear timeline, while everything, including the medical advice, kept changing on me.
What still lives in my head is this: who would have known her better than my grandfather? If he believed she would fight, I felt obligated to respect that - or at least, that's what I thought at the time.
So that one sliver of doubt was all it took to keep that whole shitshow in motion and leave me with the responsibility anyway.
Maybe I was too hopeful. Maybe I was trying to be the peacemaker when the one person who mattered most in that moment was depending on me to be clearer than I was, apparently, capable of being.
If I had known then what I know now, I would have brought her home immediately. I would have made the one decision she depended on me to make from the start.
I live with that.
