One thing that I've learned about writing is that it's hard for me to motivate myself to formulate complete thoughts on my blog posts. On the back end of my website, I have at least twenty drafts of stories I want to tell that I haven't found the correct words for them to be completed. There's empty posts with titles -- "Hats," "The Bird Funerals," "Home Is Whenever I'm With You," -- posts with loosely formed ideas that I don't yet possess the correct words to tell the full story.
This post was hard to complete, too, but for a different reason. A few weeks ago, my grandmother passed away and, although I've dealt with death before, it's very difficult to find the right words to describe how I felt about losing someone so close to me. Should I tell the story about her pushing me through stores in my stroller when I was a child, with our roles eventually reversed as we both grew older and I rolled her in her wheelchair at the mall? How I've always associated her house with Vienna Fingers and porcelain dolls, and that I still think about the tire swing that was struck by lightening in her backyard when I was a child, even still after all the years? I could write about how she loved the Internet because she could easily stay connected to her children and grandchildren, always typing in all caps because she accidentally hit the caps lock button three years ago and never shut it off, causing all of her grandchildren to receive adorable Facebook posts, like "LOVE YA, SWEET GIRL XOXO" or, in my youngest brother's case, "AND YOU WERE WORRIED THAT HE WOULDN'T MAKE FRIENDS" on a tagged photo of him a year after we'd moved across the country (which is still my favorite thing that anyone has ever done on Facebook ever).
The best thing that ever happened on the Internet. Ever.
Ultimately, deciding what to say about my grandmother was impossible, but something I needed to do. Instead of trying to pick one of the countless moments I've had with my grandma in an attempt to describe our meaningful relationship, I've instead decided to tell the story about a beautiful, sad, perfect moment -- the day we said goodbye to Grandma.
The day we said goodbye to Grandma, we went to the school. It was almost impossible not to. My grandparents had lived next to Laurel Plains Elementary School since my mom was a little kid. She and my uncles spent their childhood playing on the conveniently-close playground and after they grew up and had kids, my cousins and I continued along that tradition. Visits to Grandma's always included the trek down to the school, playing on the swings or monkey bars while listening to all the stories of mischief that inevitably accompanied the Terribile family by having the seven children that were our parents. In a way, our time at Laurel Plains as children was where we learned a lot about the way our parents grew up and the day we said goodbye to Grandma, we were all pretty nostalgic for those days.
To get to the Laurel Plains playground, you're faced with two options -- you can either go to the left and walk around the entire school or you can go to the right and jump the fence. I've been going to that playground for the last 22 years and I've never once gone to the left first. On the day we said goodbye to Grandma, it was no different. We were eight kids hopping over a fence we'd grown up climbing, some of us still in our funeral clothes, running toward the playground we remember exploring fully.
It should be noted that when I say the word "kids," I'm using that term very loosely. Between the eight of us that went to the playground that day, we ranged in ages from 17-26. In reality, we're not kids anymore. We're graduates and artists; teachers and college students; accountants and Marines. Most importantly, though, we're family. We're family that were going through a hard experience and dealing with it the best way we knew how -- depending on each other and reliving memories from our childhood.
Sometimes, you don't realize something is going to be a perfect memory until right after it's happened. The day we said goodbye to Grandma, we had a perfect moment on the swings. After hopping the fence and climbing the jungle gym, we ran to swings to have a competition on who could swing the highest. It wasn't until all eight of us were actually swinging, much higher in the air than we'd ever gotten as children, that we realized how wonderful it was that there was a perfect amount of swings for us, like we were clearly meant to go there. That day, a day that had previously been filled with tears and sadness as we said goodbye to our grandmother, was infectiously being transformed into a day of laughter as we reverted back to the days of our childhood.
It was exactly what our grandma would have wanted.
Just as there are not enough words for me to describe how much my relationship with my Grandma meant to me, there is no way for me to fully explain how perfect of a moment it was when we were on the swings. In fact, I can only say this -- it was emotional and beautiful; sad and hilarious; nostalgic and warming -- and it was the perfect way to end the day we said goodbye to Grandma.