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How To Grieve Someone Who Is Still Alive
My grandmother has been diagnosed with cancer, and the news has been hard to digest.
The last grieving experience with long-lasting effects I can remember was in middle school, when my great-grandmother from Japan passed. I heard the news in my car on the way home with my dad. The death had been sudden (brain aneurysm,) and there was nothing I could do from Italy either. The funeral was in Japan; I could not attend.
All I could do was talk about her with my family, but what I remember most clearly was crying in bed at night. I was still little then, and part of me always wanted to believe that she would live forever, or at least past 100 (I think she was 98 when she passed).
If I think of it now, she used to put a lot of effort into doing fun things for just the three of us — her, my sister, and I. We would only get to see each other for one or two months at a time during summer, so for her to turn into precious memories the limited time we spent together was amazing.
Our go-tos were a stop at the bookshop around the corner, where she would always buy us one book each…
