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Grief from Across the Ocean

Posted on Friday, August 17, 2018

It sucks I can tell you that.

I will be real with you. A big part of moving overseas is leaving your family and life behind. Including, for people like me, perhaps an ailing grandfather.  And it hurts to hear he is gone, to get a phone call from thousands of miles away saying what we knew was coming has come, to hear your dad on the phone almost crying and then hanging up. How do you grieve a loss you knew was coming? I am a continent, an ocean and another continent away from a man you have now missed seeing for the last time.

There are stories I will never hear from him. Those two purple hearts I found in the den when I was thirteen, I’ll never know how he got them, or why there were buried in a drawer hidden from view.

Will the sound of percolating coffee stop reminding me of you? I guess I have both you and grandma to blame for starting my deep love of hot beverages. “Helping” you make coffee every morning when I came to visit. We didn’t say much but you would let me read the paper with you and drink more creamer in my coffee than actual coffee. Having afternoon tea parties with you and Grandma, little snacks included. Grown up tea for you two and “tingly tea” for us girls (root beer disguised as tea as it’s poured into the fancy teapot and our little teacups). We toasted each other and sipped our tea with our pinkies out like princesses. I remember graduating from little candies and tingly tea to grown up tea and brownies. I remember no matter how busy we were on any trip tea parties were the most important event. Thank you for treasuring those early morning with a jet legged ten year old drinking more creamer than coffee. Thank you for those much later morning doing the puzzles from the paper and sipping now black coffee with your 19 year old granddaughter. I hope you know I treasured those too.

 

It took me awhile to post this, but I want to honor you Grandpa.

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