Who do you miss most, right now?
I love you all, and I would walk over you in golf spikes if it meant I could have 20 minutes with my grandmother. Since Kick was born, I haven’t been able to stop thinking how much she’d have loved it if I’d been able to put this baby in her arms.
A.
I miss my dad the most. But sometimes he is right here, because I hear his laughter or outrage popping out of my mouth. He hated Republicans with a passion and enjoyed shouting at the tv. When I was young I thought it was over the top. Now I know better! I was going to say that I would love to hear what he’d say about the present day conservatives, but he’d probably get so mad he’d have a stroke. Ginger ftw.
my father died coming up on 11 years ago, and hardly a day goes by when i don’t think i should pick up the phone to tell him something: the birth of his great-grandsons, me (finally) getting my masters degree, etc.
My mom. She wanted to be a grandma forever, and would love these damned kids.
My wife is in stage six of Alzheimer’s. I miss her so much every day that it is a constant ache.
My Dad…
It’s barely 6 months since that careless, impatient trucker just rolled over him…and I’m just one-firebombing-incident-at-that-trucking-company away from going to jail because my best friend, the guy who shared our barrel full of inside jokes and ‘rituals’ with me…is gone…just stolen, shooed off the planet, from walking me down whatever aisle my guy and I will meet at, from ever coming to our place for a night of dinner & ‘Casablanca’ viewing, by 30 seconds-worth of impatience…gone.
I try to keep it under control, but it’s always ‘right there’ just roiling under the surface. The severe grief that I pretend isn’t ‘that’ rough, so that I can make it through the work day w/o resorting to medication…
Then some.little.thing, so seemingly innocuous, so normal will trigger a crying jag of epic proportions. Because, a good thing or annoying thing sends me grabbing for my phone to text him…but before I can finish getting it in my mitts…the stone reality that he isn’t here to get the message hammers home…
My dad’s been dead for 41 years and not a day goes by but what I don’t think about him or wish I could bounce an idea off him.
I’m sorry you are going through this, A. I know how you feel. Having that baby reminds you of all that you have loved, and lost–and that feeling only gets bigger and deeper as the baby gets older and becomes more of a person that you want to share. I feel like when my babies were little, especially the first one, I wanted to show her off to my grandmother (one of whom was gone, one of whom was in kind of a twilight stage). But as they have gotten older, and as the oldest one heads off to college, I miss being able to really share the women they have become with the women who helped shape me. Because I know how they would have delighted in these girls. Because I can imagine the kinds of conversations they would have.
We just this minute got back from celebrating the 97th birthday of our neighbor, a wonderful woman who has been like a grandmother to my girls. My own grandmother would be…uh…112 now if she were alive. That’s a mighty big span but 97 gets close to it. But its not the same. Still, I think what was important about those women gets passed on by us, if we have it in us.
Same here, my grandmother.