Miranda

I woke up around 3AM because my husband and I are getting over a cold, and I still have a sore throat. Luckily my cat is here to keep me company, and again when I wake up at 5, 6, and finally 7:30AM ready to start the day.

My husband and I are actually flying out of the country today on our first vacation as a married couple (?a delayed honeymoon) so I am not working today, but instead am catching up on some chores.

First it's emptying cat litter boxes, getting them fresh water, and doing dishes.

Then it's running to the store (past Fitz on Fourth, a favorite) to grab some cough drops. I treated myself to an iced PSL from Three Graces on the way back home.

After doing laundry and putting it off as long as possible, I'm going to clean the books I got from my grandma's house after she passed this spring. I've had them for a little while now, but it's been tough to motivate myself to actually clean and look through the books. It wasn't a pile she left for me, but rather it was in her home and my family was going to donate them anyway, so I wanted to at least see what the books were.

My grandma was a really cool person who had a lot of tragedies in her life. Her high school sweetheart, husband, and father of her 3 children passed away unexpectedly in an accident, before she was able to tell him she was pregnant with their 4th. She had a son and named him after her husband. Then the following year, her father passed. It's a lot to happen when you're in your 20s, a widowed mother, and in a small town. While she never remarried, she did get support from her family and friends, and raised some awesome people.

Then, years last when her youngest was 48, he passed unexpectedly of a heart attack. I had never seen my grandma cry before, and it was heartbreaking given how my uncle came to be and how he'd never met his father. It crushed my whole family.

I tried to call her a lot but it never will feel like I did it enough. A couple days after calling her, almost a year ago now come Thanksgiving, she had a massive stroke. She never recovered fully physically, but thankfully her personality was intact. (See: lots of sarcasm and attitude and jokes.) She had a gradual decline and passed just 5 months later in April, and while we knew it might be coming, it was still devastating. 

I'm still grieving and I don't think I'll ever be "over it." This is one of the reasons it was hard to go through the books, but I'm glad I did. One of the ones I found was Rosemary's Baby (my grandma's name) with her name inscribed and the year of my uncle's birth in the cover. She still found humor when things were hard, and I'm going to try my best to do the same.

Soooo after having a long, heartfelt think and write about all of this, my husband came home and it was time to head to the Philly airport. (I recognize now that it's a little odd to leave the country on Election Day, but we voted by mail before we left!) When my day finished, I wasn't in Philly at all but instead on a flight to London.