best of them all

Grief manifests itself in strange ways. I just got home from the grocery store. Somehow, during the course of my half hour visit, 3 boxes of cake mix, 1 box of Cool Mint Creme Double Stuf Oreos, and 1 pint of Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream ended up in my cart. I do not regularly buy, nor consume, any of these things. But there they were.

***

When I was in Madison at the end of September, I e-mailed my aunts and uncles and asked them to go to lunch with my grandmother, my parents, and I. Over the last couple of a years, my grandmother has regularly taken out her kids for lunch every week or two and knowing I would be home, she was eager for all of us to get together.

She was convinced that the soreness in her shoulder, the jutting of the bone, meant she had cancer, even though at least two different doctors told her she was perfectly fine. It was typical Grandma lunch conversation and my uncle and I did our best to deflect her fear about her shoulder, to convince her that no, she was fine. She was 85 and in near-perfect health. She took no medications at all. She didn't need to worry; we didn't need to worry.

At the end of the lunch, she rummaged in her pockets, pulled a bill from them, handed it to me and said, "I better give you your birthday present now," for no real reason that I can recall. It was September 28, fully more than a month before my birthday. My grandmother had always been a religious observer of birthdays; I don't think she had ever missed sending me a card in my entire life and so there was plenty of time for her to do that. Still, she insisted I take the gift.

***

My birthday was this past Thursday. Two days earlier, my beloved grandmother passed away unexpectedly after the aneurysm in her stomach burst (it was the other malady she was convinced would kill her, though it was stable for many years) while I wrapped up a conference I was attending in Northern Indiana. Her death was mercifully swift and though I could not be there, I take enormous comfort in knowing that most of my family was able to hold her hands as she passed peacefully.

Over the next couple days, I heard from my cousins--my sweet, beautiful cousins--that Grandma had been thinking of me. Sending a birthday card and gift to Alison was on the to-do list they found in her apartment. A friend of the family told me at the wake on Friday that she had spoken with my grandmother earlier in the week and she had told her friend that she needed to get a card out to me.

Until I left for Madison on Friday morning to be with my family, I was afraid this card had magically made it into the mail and I would find it when I was least expecting it to appear in my mailbox. It hasn't arrived yet; accepting that it won't is the hardest thing.