Letter to Louise

Dear Grandma Johnson,

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, but not a day has gone by where you haven’t stayed with me.

There’s so much I wish I could tell you. I wish I could sit at your kitchen table again while the smell of cheeseburgers fills the air and cats start gathering outside, waiting for their nightly feast. I can still picture you, scraping the dinner scraps into that old coffee can every evening and mixing them with canned food before stepping outside to feed your feral crew. They’d come running down the hill like a little army of ghosts, wild and hungry, but you never flinched. You treated them with gentleness, like they mattered. And they did. Because to you, everything with a heartbeat mattered.

You once told me you can always tell someone’s character by how they treat animals. You were right. You lived that truth in every way. You showed kindness to the overlooked and the discarded—not just animals, but people, too. Especially me.

When I think back to my childhood, so much of it was cold. Quiet. Missing the things that should’ve been automatic—hugs, kind words, someone to notice when I was hurting. But then there was you.

You called me Sweetie. You wrote me letters that told me I was special. You told me you loved me, and you meant it. You made me feel seen when I didn’t even realize how invisible I felt everywhere else. You didn’t just hug me—you held the parts of me that were breaking before I even knew they were broken.

Your house was magic to me. Not just because of the candy bars and the cooler full of forbidden sodas—though, let’s be honest, those were amazing—but because it felt like walking into a different world. A world where I could breathe. A world where love didn’t have to be earned by staying quiet or being good. It was just there.

You died when I was still a teenager, and it felt like the one person who truly got me disappeared. But you didn’t, not really. I carry you everywhere. I see you when I feed my own herd of misfit animals (although it is a much larger and more diverse group).  I remember your strength, your softness, your way of loving without condition—and I try every day to live up to that.

Some nights, I dream of haunted rooms. Of voices in the dark that sound too familiar. But I think if you were still here, you’d sit beside me in those dreams. You’d hold my hand. You’d say, “It’s okay. I’m here.”

And I’d believe you.

I hope wherever you are, you know how much you meant to me. How much you still mean to me. And how everything good and kind and warm in me has your fingerprints all over it.

Love always,

C.

The Grief Monster Comes for Us All

 I experienced a lot of funerals as a kid.  I can't put a number on it, but I remember going to quite a few.  My parents weren't old, but they had me in their mid-thirties and they had some family members that were on the older side and it just seemed like people were always dying.  My paternal grandfather died before I was born and then my step-grandfather died when I was like six.  Great grandparents went as an adolescent and grandparents were gone in my teens, with my last one passing in my early twenties.  Then I was exposed to tragedies like a middle school nurse dying in a car wreck, a friend in high school committing suicide, a friend in my late twenties committing suicide... I think that the way I learned to handle it was by just reminding myself that death was part of life and never thinking about the people again.

Sounds easy, right?  Of course it's not possible, we know this.  Some are easier to forget than others.  Some you never forget.  Some remain burned into your memories and haunt you at the most inopportune times.  Then comes the big death- the death of a parent.  I have not experienced the death of a child, and I hope never to have to.  I have a friend that I have recently seen experience this and I can't even fathom her pain.  But in my case, I finally experienced the death of a parent.   One of my best friends lost both of her parents at a young age and she was very close to them.  I went to the funerals and I have seen how hard it has been on her.  But I didn't think it would be like that for me because I didn't have that kind of relationship with my parent.  

But then when my dad started to get sick, one of my therapists worried because she said that people with borderline personality disorder experience loss differently if we have unresolved trauma.  She told my husband that I was going to take it hard.  I told myself that she didn't know me as well as she thought because I would accept it like I did every other death in my life.  Okay, so maybe I was wrong, and maybe she was right.  My sister-in-law once told me that I should have a "come to Jesus" moment with my dad and tell him how I felt about how I was raised.  I disagreed.  I thought it would put an undue strain on our already strained relationship.  Why say unkind things to each other when we clearly are two different people who think completely different things?  Those would leave memories that could never be taken back.  She said if he died having never unburdened myself I'd regret it.  I'm glad I didn't listen to her.  Like I thought, I would never have wanted my dad to have died knowing that I felt the way that I did.  Instead, the last memory I want him to have of me is the text I sent him telling him that I loved him.

What will I have?  Grief.  But just like with all those funerals I went to as a child, I'm trying to tell myself that death is a part of life.  But then it raises questions about my own mortality that I don't want to think about.  And that's a topic for a whole 'nother blog- or therapy session.

(See, I told you I'd make another post!)

Childhood Memories: Cheese Thief Edition

This childhood memory will probably be highly disputed due to its controversial nature...

Okay, to preface the memory, I need to point out that we were very well fed as children and never starved.  Aside from breakfast, lunch and dinner, if we wanted a snack or dessert, we had to ask permission to eat something and it wasn't guaranteed approval.  I can only imagine what kind of costs went into feeding a family of 6!  So, it is understandable that occasionally the more "expensive" items would be missed if they disappeared.

Now onto the memory.  From the best of my recollection (because I think I had to have been like 4 or 5 or something) the incident started because someone had opened a block of cheese and eaten it.  I don't remember if the whole block of cheese was eaten and the evidence was found in the trash can or if someone had opened the block of cheese and helped themselves.  Well, the fact that someone had eaten cheese without permission was a big no-no.  (If you are accustomed to buying blocks of cheese, you know they aren't cheap.)  So, an interrogation process was lead in order to find the culprit.  Apparently my three siblings all denied the allegations, as did I.  I was 100% sure I was innocent as I knew that I had not partaken in the disappearance of the cheese.

Well, here's where the travesty lies.   Apparently since everyone denied it, it was assumed that I was the guilty party.  I was the youngest, so maybe it was thought that the older children would have no reason to lie about something so trivial.  Despite my protests, I was sent to my room and told I would remain there until I confessed.  Imagine how much this crushed my faith in humanity.  I can understand how inmates feel that are incarcerated, but innocent.  Instead of mulling over a confession, I was sitting there wondering why I was being punished- because mind you, none of my three siblings were being punished because my parents assumed it was me.

Fast forward until I was allowed out of my room.  This is where the rest of the memory gets mildly fuzzy.  I BELIEVE that someone eventually confessed and that's why I was allowed out.  But, this doesn't seem too likely because I doubt any of them felt too guilty that I was getting punished.  So, maybe they let me out because they figured I'd been punished enough had I actually been the perpetrator.  Either way, that's all I remember happening from the event.  I learned that the world is not fair and that I can't expect people to apologize because no one did.  I'm sure to this day (if my parents thought this was a real memory) that they think I was the one who ate the cheese.

Childhood Memories: Rocks Edition

My memory to share today involves rocks and imaginative play.  My kids were playing store the other day and it made me remember something that I've remembered from time to time over the years.  I'm pretty sure my brother would be the only one to verify the factualness of these events.

I remember when I was young my brother and I would play store with rocks outside.  We would take crayons out and find big rocks and write what type of merchandise they were.  For instance, one might say microwave, one might say radio, etc.  Then we would use smaller rocks as money (not sure if we wrote amounts on them or not.)  We would take turns using our "money" and deciding what we wanted to buy.

It sounds incredibly dorky, but we lived out in the country and weren't inundated with useless toys, so we kind of had to make our own fun where we could.  Much different than these days when you can buy play money at the dollar tree.  When my kids were playing store, I was going to tell them they could use rocks as money and one of them held up these big fake play coins they had and said, "but we have money to play with."  Ah, yes... hard times our kids live in.

Childhood Memories

Oftentimes I find myself thinking back about things I remember from when I was young.  The funny thing is that nine times out of ten if I run the memories by my parents or siblings, they don't think it happened or that it was a figment of my imagination.  But if that were the case, why would we remember them so vividly, especially if they were just mundane experiences?

Well, here's my theory.  Each of us is impacted differently by our experiences in life.  Perhaps something that I held onto was more important to me than one of my siblings who doesn't remember the event happening.  Likewise, my parents have four kids worth of memories plus all the years of memories that they didn't have children.  So, it would make perfect sense that they wouldn't remember every little detail and event that their children do.

I'm not a big fan of being wrong, and these are memories that I've had for YEARS, not just some random thing that popped into my head and I was like, "oh, yeah, I think I remember something like that happening."  No, these feel like genuine memories.  So, in that line of thinking, I've decided to start sharing some of these memories with my readers.  But, my point in all this is that they may or may not be disputed by the other parties involved.  Of course I think they are valid, but chances are, I'm the only one.  They will hereto be referred to as "Childhood Memories: ***** Edition."

Happy Monday!!!