Dear Grandpa

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To The Perfect Grandpa:

Looking at you in the hospital bed, slight and quiet, was disconcerting. Your skin so fair, it appeared translucent. The bruises from every poke & prod you'd endured, so glaring. Your belief that you are everyone's burden so prominently displayed across your face. 

The lump in my throat a reminder of the weight of where we were. And why. 

But as I pulled the chair up close to your bed and sat down, life danced across your eyes. There you were. Right where I left you. Right where you've always been. 

Since I was a little girl, you have had my heart. Trips to Buda-fest to ride rides. Sitting on the porch outside your "work" counting red cars as they passed by. Dancing on your feet. You have always been the perfect grandpa. 

The life you've lived, all 95 years and counting, is an epic story. Your middle name is Strong and nothing could be as perfect a representation of you. What strength is must have taken to be the youngest of 10; to get married to the love of your life and stay married for your entire life; to be a man who raised 4 sons who were raised to be men; to live with your family in Argentina and Mexico, a stranger in a foreign land. And look at what came of it ...
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Your sons are all so blessed to have been raised by a man who not only passed down his tall stature, but his larger-than-life character. You raised 4 men who are kind and funny and smart; who are genuine and caring and successful. Your sons gave you 6 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren: talented, loving and the amazing continuation of such an amazing man.
    
I am blessed to have lived so many years of my childhood visiting you on weekends, seeing the pride you had in me, talking to you for hours, learning your love for puzzles and letter writing. I am blessed to have given my children the chance to spend time with you, learn of you, learn from you. I am honored that my children all have your hunger for reading, love of writing, brilliant mind and witty humor. 


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I know that your end is near. Nearer than I'd like it to be, for sure. Probably not as near as you'd like it, tho. You have lived a wonderful and full 95 years. You have certainly earned the right to decide that you're done, and to go out on your terms in your own time. 

I promise to respect your decision. I promise to honor your choice. I can also promise that when your last day comes, it will knock the breath out of me. It will be selfish and inconsiderate, but I will be sad. It will be one of the hardest days of my life, despite the relief I know your soul will feel. 

I won't apologize for the selfish sadness I will feel because when you're gone, there will be another hole left right next to the one made when we lost Dad. The emptiness will be vast. With you will go my last ties to large chunks of my childhood, to stories of my father, to wisdom unavailable from anyone else. 

But I also promise to hold tight to every moment, to keep your spirit alive recounting our stories, retelling your tales and recalling my memories. This, my perfect Grandpa, I certainly can promise. 

You aren't gone yet tho. You can't get rid of me that easily, Old Man. There is still time to pull my chair close, take a seat, watch your eyes dance and soak you in.

#13: DE-FENSE! DE-FENSE!

What happened to my appetite?


Sunday it was definitely from stress and anxiety.
Monday, maybe some of the same, but something else was just as at play.
Today, I can't call it. I'm not having the same emotional day & would actually say I'm fine. So ...


This is making me wonder if I have cycles of no-appetite each month just as I have cycles of feeling like I'm  CONSTANTLY hungry. Maybe I just never noticed because I was eating all the wrong things at the wrong time in the wrong ways? I don't have the answer, but I can say my interest in this is piqued and it's just in time because I was feeling in need of something new to obsess about.


While my lack of hunger for 3+ days is doing great things for my relationship with the scale, it's leaving me with nothing of Challenge-related substance to share - actually I've lost 3 pounds in 3 days. So today I'm going to share some things that have nothing to do with being carb free. Fasten your seat belts folks.

So, for as long as I have known myself, I have been someone who uses defense mechanisms to protect myself from ever getting to place where I will actually need defense mechanisms. I'm a master at it really. In fact, I should teach classes on it - college level. 


One of my biggest talents is the ability to compartmentalize just about anything with the scent of emotion and feel nothing about it. Ever. Altho a handy tool in many situations, it's not healthy. But forever my priority was to be safe from emotion and hurt and, therefore, UNhealthy. Truthfully, I equated vulnerability with weakness and God-forbid I, or anyone else, see me as weak. I remember a friend of mine who I'd known and been very close to for 18 years telling me he'd never seen me cry. WHAT? I mean, I don't cry non-stop, but not once, as close as we were, in EIGHTEEN YEARS?? That's not good for my soul. 


Having each of my kids certainly broke some of those walls down, but really, my consistent pattern is to see sadness, hurt, heartache and disappointment coming and to throw up double-thick, reinforced steel walls. Then I'd add a heaping pile of super-anger. 


Yes, the other highly-emotionally-stable things that I do is to fight every emotional situation with anger. It's the secondary emotion to almost anything else. When I'm afraid, I lash out in what comes across as anger. When I'm sad, I find away to spin it into anger. When I'm hurt, I say "I'm mad because ..." Why is that? Because anger is external. I get mad at myself way less often than I am angry at someone else. It's something that generally is placed onto another person in reaction to the primary emotion (fear, sadness, hurt, frustration, anxiousness) that I'm feeling inside. 


None of this is stuff I recognized about myself for most of my life. I was simply going along in life happy and goofy mixed with flashes of anger cover-up. I made some big mistakes because of the anger, some of which I struggled to forgive myself for or get over the consequences of for a really long time. A few years ago I started doing the work to get thru the anger and I definitely learned somethings but much like everything else I've admitted to over the past few weeks, just as it was getting to the really intense and difficult work, I walked away. 


But then I lost my dad and was completely unprepared. I was unprepared for the raw emotion that would be filling me up all day every day for weeks. I was unprepared to have habits I'd learned over years of self-protection be blown to bits. I was unprepared to learn things about my dad and my relationship with my dad that I had never know and that would cause me to question everything I thought I knew about everything. Including myself. I was really, really UNPREPARED. 


I have to say the only way to describe that loss was that it shook me to my core and challenged everything. I miss him greatly, every single day, and I'm still incredibly sad in waves that come less-often, at least. But if we are supposed to always look for the lesson or the good that can come from something bad or hard or traumatic, then I can say that losing my dad changed me ONLY for the better. I had to let go of a lot of feelings I had about him, our relationship as Father & Daughter and even about myself, especially in relation to being his Daughter. But that process has been amazing. It has left me so much less angry, so much more peaceful and so much closer to him. Ironic, I guess. 


But life comes to you as it's supposed to and for me, it's important that I take every opportunity I have to grow and learn. 

• I'm so much more tolerant of people (which, for anyone who knows me, is saying A LOT because most people get on my nerves). 
• I'm much slower to judge a person, their situation and their choices and much more aware that even if (you think) you've been thru the VERY SAME thing, it isn't THE same because YOU aren't the same as the next person.
• I'm more open to life, experiences, possibilities. 
• I take good risks versus risky behavior. I used to revel in RISK after RISK for destructive reasons, but now I take RISKS because of the potential positive payoff in my life.
• I have faith. I'm not sure I had much of that ever before. 
• I know more about who and what I'm NOT and what I DON'T want. This may seem small but I think I've only ever been aware of who I WAS/AM and what I did WANT. The difference for me is that in past I felt I had to learn everything by making mistakes to learn from and now I know enough about myself to say NO or YES as it's right for me, to follow my GUT and to make choices I stand behind the FIRST time.   

But the two biggest things that I've found in the past two years are 1) my absolute truest self and 2) my happiness. I'm certain there is so much more growth and learning coming my way and I know that without the growth I've already experienced, I'd never be open to anything life is bringing me. And what a waste that would be. 

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Maybe that bit of honest confession will explain why I felt so open to the changes that these Challenges would bring me. Maybe it's why I'm finding self-reflection refreshing instead of scary. Maybe it's why I'm finding more success than failure in trying things that are so hard for me. 


But whatever the reason, I'm enjoying this growth, I'm proud of myself for allowing it and I appreciate Dad for giving me this gift in his absence. 

EVER  ONWARD