I don’t like los­ing my peo­ple. In fact, I am per­fectly sick of it. Four funer­als in three years is too many. While we knew this day was inevitable, it doesn’t make it any eas­ier. But… life goes on all around you whether you want it to or not. So I’m back to the busi­ness of life after a sad week full of days last week. Grandma died on Tues­day and we laid her to rest Friday.

My grandma, Elma, was a great lady. (That’s her in the pic­ture above.) She was sharp as a tack. That is until the Alzheimer’s took over. What a cruel dis­ease it is, slowly tak­ing your loved one away while their per­son is still there. She actu­ally left us a while back, but it was still hard because her body was still with us along with spo­radic days of foggy clar­ity. Those days became soupier and soupier, dense with con­fu­sion and then ulti­mately unre­spon­sive­ness dur­ing the last week. She would have been 97 in July. Isn’t that amazing?

I am how­ever so grate­ful I was blessed to have her in my life for so long. Every week I would do her hair and we would have our time together, laugh and she would share her sto­ries from the past with me. I have those mem­o­ries bub­bling up a lot lately. Good and happy memories.

She was an only child to two teach­ers and her mother died when she was only 2 years old of the Span­ish flu in 1919. Her father left her to be raised by her grand­mother, another teacher, and raised her well. She was a col­lege grad­u­ate which was really some­thing for a woman of her time. She worked as a stenog­ra­pher for many years and even­tu­ally for the FBI along with my grand­fa­ther who was a spe­cial agent. She was incred­i­bly artis­tic and always had a hobby. It was fun to hear all the inter­est­ing sto­ries of a by-gone era. Now, I’ll just have to remem­ber them.

Below are a few pic­tures from the funeral on Fri­day. The sec­ond one below is of me and my dad. My grandma was his mother and he was the baby. She had two sons and unfor­tu­nately we attended his funeral last August. She is buried by him and my grand­fa­ther now.

The rib­bon below are of two names, the first Grandma and the sec­ond is upside down but is GG which is what my son called her. Pink was always her favorite color. I think she would have approved of the pink roses and car­na­tions.She is already missed.