Yesterday at 3:31 PM

Yesterday at 3:31 PM, I lost my Gradddad. It was expected, but not in the usual way. He was sick. He was old. He wanted to die. His wife was waiting for him. But all of that does not remove the fact that he is gone now. I will not talk with again. I will not laugh with him again. I will not wonder at him again. I now have to live with the fact that I only have one real grandparent left. My mom now is an orphan. She is alone and has never had to deal with that, but as of yesterday, she let go of a hand that has been hers to hold for the last 58 years, but now that hand is cold and no longer grips back at hers. She dropped it and fled to the only safety she knows. All of it makes me very sad and I'm completely unsure of how to feel about any of it. But as of today, I only have one grandparent left and he seems so very far away. The older I get, the more the first line of Charles Frazier's second book means to me: There is no scathless journey. We are moving as quickly as we can and time is not stopping. Only moving ahead at an alarming rate and we are all losing so much that we cannot ever seem to gather our losses so we can see what we have left. I will miss him a lot and am so sad that I avoided him. I can never see him again and that is something I will regret.