Accepting the Inevitable

My husband’s grandmother is dying.  This isn’t news to us.  She’s been dying for a few years now.  It just seems to be speeding up and possibly nearing the end at last.

I’m happy for her.  She’s ready to go.  “I just miss my Ruben,” she says, when she talks about it (which isn’t often.)  It has been over 15 years since her husband died.  That’s a long time to be alone.

Her children are not ready for life without her.  She is a wonderful and amazing woman and the hole she will leave in our family will be huge.  She is irreplaceable to us and they aren’t yet at a place of admitting the inevitable.  They don’t want to even think of life without her in it.

I don’t really understand it.  Death was such a part of life when I was growing up that I don’t find it uncomfortable at all. People died and life went on.  My husband’s family is different.  They don’t talk about things the way we did.  Sickness and death just aren’t topics of conversation they have. They don’t discuss unpleasant things.  There may be merit in doing it their way.  Their family gets along and mine is a story for another day.

But I can’t get past the fact that she is dying.  I don’t know how to pretend anything else.  I don’t know how to ignore the obvious.  For the first time in a long time, I really feel like an outsider in this family.  I don’t know what the right things are to say, and I don’t know if I could say them if I did.  I’m just going to sit here quietly and pray and be secretly thrilled for her.  She’s going to see her God and her love. Where’s the sorrow in that?