A Heaving Mass of Grief

I am trying to sleep, but it's not working. Every time I lie down my brain goes to the events of the last 36 hours and I sit up, heaving with grief, tears pouring down my face.

My grandma is dead.
My grandma is dead.
My grandma is dead.

I cannot take it in. My grandma is dead. My beloved grandma is dead.

Mira Isobel Barratt, born 2 May 1917, in Boorowa NSW. Died 18 June 2009 in Canberra ACT. My grandma.

She was an amazing woman. She coped with a husband who gambled and drank away most of his life. With 3 daughters, including my mother. All headstrong, feminist women. With the death of one of her daughters. She went up in a helicopter in her 60's. She worked full-time until she was 70, and then only retired because she went blind in one eye (her sight later returned). For the last 10 years she's lived with my aunt; first in a house behind my aunt's house, and for the last few years in a converted granny flat within my aunt's house. Lately she has struggled to hear, struggled to see. Her body was breaking down. She was ill frequently. She got confused. She never knew what day it was. She forgot her medications. She was very old.

But oh God, how much I loved her. I remember first finding out that she also believed in Jesus. That she read her bible and she knew her prayer book. That she trusted in God's provision for her.

She asked me to be the one to pray for the family after she'd gone. I never realised that she would go. I knew she was sick. I knew that she was old. But she held our family together. A matriarch by anybody's reckoning. Strong, clever, independent to a fault. She's the model for every woman in my family. From her generation, to the generation after me.

She stuck by my grandfather. Through long years of suffering and unhappiness, she stuck by him. She asked me to sing at her funeral - I'm not sure how I'm going to do it. I can barely breathe at the moment without incredible pain. I cannot believe I'll never hug her again; I'll never sit in her little room and chat to her. I'll never stroke her soft head. I'll never feel her bony ribs. I'll never hear her voice again. I'll never sit and cross-stitch while she dozes in front of the cricket.

That she'll never come after me, offering me some little thing or another. That she'll never say again "Well done, you did it". That she'll never share about what she learnt at church that week. That we'll never talk about our favourite parts of the Bible together. That we'll never talk about the family and what's happening.

Oh God. I can't believe she's gone. I just can't.