"My wild Irish rose, the sweetest flower that grows..."

My gramma F (W) passed away early morning this past Tuesday. God, I don't even know where to start. You could say I'm still in kind of a daze about it all. It just doesn't seem real. The funeral visitation is tonight, the funeral tomorrow. It'll probably hit me then. I wouldn't say it was much of a shocker. She was seventy-eight years old and her health had steadily been going down hill for the past year or so. She'd been through so much; she was a fighter, for sure. I think we all sort of saw it coming, her especially. Just the things she would say and do; we were over there for Thanksgiving and she was pretty insistent about giving my dad a wooden crucifix that had been my grampa W's..

I'm not going to get into the details much. I mean, I really don't think that's what's most important, anyways. That's not what we're going to remember about her in the future. I'm mostly just writing this to honor her a bit. I wanted to do a reading at the funeral, but I think I'm going to be wayyyy too emotional for that.

Gramma was really an amazing, wonderful person. My dad is the middle of nine kids, so the household was a bit tight. Gramma didn't work and my grampa worked three jobs at one point, just trying to feed everyone. She somehow always managed to get everyone fed, though. They say she was constantly doing laundry, cooking, and doing everything the kids needed her to. I don't know if I could even do it. She loved them so much. They were her life. They didn't exactly live in the best part of town, so some of the families that lived around them weren't exactly ideal. My dad was telling me how whenever one of the neighbor kids needed somewhere else to stay she would always let them. She even let one of them move in with the family. He said that you never went to dinner expecting it to be just the family, there were always other people. But somehow, even with all those kids, no one left the table hungry. She make it work somehow.

She wasn't like that with just her kids, though. Gramma always took care of my cousins and I. First thing she'd ask when we came over was if we were hungry. Then she'd go into the kitchen and start putting sandwiches together. It didn't matter whether you were even hungry or not, you were going to eat that sandwich. When I was really little, after my grampa W. died, we used to go over and stay at her apartment with her. She would let us stay up as late as we wanted. My uncle Kenny was living with her then and she would always make him go get us pizzas. We'd stay up late eating pizza, drink Surge (remember that stuff?), eating candy, and just being idiots. I'm pretty sure I saw my first rated-R movie at her apartment when I was like five. You could just tell how much she loved us.

I don't even know if anyone read this or not. And it really doesn't even matter to me. I kind of felt like I just needed to say something. My gramma was one of the greatest people on this earth. She had the biggest heart, the warmest heart. And I'm extremely proud to be able to call myself her granddaughter. We're all going to miss her so much. But it's a comfort knowing that she's no longer in pain. She's with Grampa W now, and she's with God. Rest in peace Gramma, and know that we all love and miss you so, so much.