More sad news

Literally, just a few short hours after my last post, I was told that my grandmother had passed away. She had been battling strokes and heart attacks for the past several years and her health had been steadily declining. She would have been 93 years old this May and I will miss her beyond what words can explain.

I fail to understand this strange concept that I have had with her death since I was a child. I never really knew how I would be able to face it once it actually happened, and well, here I am, and it has happened. She was indeed a second mother to me and even called me son.

I used to wake up as a child having had nightmares of her dying and would make my mom call her when we were living in California, just to make sure that she was okay. It always seemed to be a constant fear and preoccupation with me that I would lose her somehow, and I'm not really sure why I even felt that way because her and my mother were the two people that were always by my side no matter what happened in my life.

When my ex-wife Adrienne and I were still together, her grandmother in Texas died. I had just barely even known her, but I remember driving down the interstate and thinking about how she must feel, and how I would feel if that were my grandmother, and the sense of loss, and I started to cry at the mere thought of such a loss. Now it has finally happened, and the tears seem as though they will never stop, even after all of these years of "practice" for the time when the real thing would come.

Every time a patient that I would take care of in the nursing home would die, I would always think to myself how she was a grandmother to someone, or a mother, and how she should be treated as such, as someone's mother. Essentially that is what Buddhism teaches, to consider everyone and everything that lives as having once been your mother, and to treat them with that respect.

It was very difficult for me to not let this be an emotional upset tonight when I was at the center doing my ngondro practice, and after having discussed it with my mom earlier, I also honestly do not think that I can bear to attend her funeral. My grief is such that I think I would not be able to contain myself or to handle my emotions and would just be more of an upset to all those around me if I were to attend. I know that this would in no way be a disrespect to her, as she knew that I loved her like a second mother and will miss her all the rest of the days of my life.