That summer, I learned that grief doesn’t wait its turn. Some grief intertwines, blurring the edges until you can no longer tell where one ends and another begins.
That July, my maternal grandmother passed away at ninety years old…only five months after I lost him.
Two losses, so close together, felt almost unreal. Like grief didn’t even have time to settle before it was asked to stretch itself wider, to hold even more. One kind of loss was expected, wrapped in a long life and years of memories. The other… tragic. And somehow, carrying both at once made neither one feel lighter.
You fight to hold yourself together, even though your heart is in pieces.
My Granny was a strong, quiet woman. She had lived through so much in her lifetime—the Great Depression, World War II, and everything that followed.
She told us grandchildren to never stop reading, to keep learning, no matter how old we grew. There was always a newspaper and a book beside her, as constant as her presence.
Even now, I can see her there—turning pages, taking in the world, holding onto knowledge like it was something sacred.
Losing her was hard. I wrote to Paul, telling him how much we loved her, how deeply we missed her.
But I was still so buried in my grief for him that I couldn’t untangle the two. The sorrow for her folded into the sorrow I was already carrying, until it all felt like one heavy, endless ache.
It was hard to separate what I was feeling—whether I was mourning her, him, or everything at once. Grief doesn’t always come in clean lines. Sometimes it overlaps, blurs, and settles into every corner of your heart all at the same time.
My Granny Essie
Ebbs & Flows 