My grandmother died last night. This wasn’t a shock or a surprise. Her health has been on the decline, and she’s been in hospice for the last month. She lived a long life, and in her final days she was surrounded by her three adult children.
My grandma was a kind woman. She wasn’t perfect, but I always felt loved in her presence. She was a retired kindergarten teacher, and was still working when I was a kid. I have so many happy memories sitting at her kitchen table, and I’m going to carry those with me for the rest of my life. She was also proof that anyone who claims that you get more conservative as you get older is full of shit, because she certainly didn’t.
I think it’s interesting how the body processes grief sometimes. I don’t know that I’ll cry, but over the past month, knowing this was coming, I’ve felt a tension in my gut. Now that she’s passed, instead of relief that tension is replaced by a sense of emptiness. That something is missing that should still be there. Something has been taken away, and I feel it.
Of course, as I wrote that, I immediately started crying… so I guess my body processes grief in pretty ordinary ways too.
I wanted to come up with something profound linking this to Beltane, which we sit in the middle of right now, but it just seemed hackneyed. Like I was trying to dig out some greater significance when the truth is death comes whenever it wants. The only predictable thing about it is that it’s the end of all of our journeys. I hope that when I pass I’m so lucky to have lived such a long life with people that I love around me in my final days.
For the record, I will be fine. I just needed to get these words out while they were still in my head. I don’t have some rousing conclusion or deep insight to tack on here at the end, just that gut feeling that something is missing.
Because it is.
On Monday night a storm rolled through town. It only took a half an hour for the rain and wind to hit and leave, but in that time a tornado passed by about fifteen miles south of where I live. It was one of four that hit Eau Claire county during that storm, but thankfully those tornados hit mostly unoccupied farmland. 
Even though I just got home, it’s time to hit the road again — as on Saturday (April 26th 2025) I’m going to be at 
So I just got home from traveling out to Maryland to visit my sister and her family for the Easter weekend. We got in the truck and drove the almost exactly one thousand miles to her home in Rockville, MD. It’s the second time we’ve done this, and we genuinely spend twice as much time traveling as we do actually spending time with family.
