This is a guest article by Ann Neimann. Her grandma passed away when she was 16 from a heart attack

My grandmother was devoted to Jesus.

She had carefully hung crosses lining her house, embellishing a space she hoped would venerate her. She scheduled her days in a planner with a daily Bible quote. When she heard I was going to an all-girls Catholic high school, she sent me a book of holy quotes with a two-dollar bill inside a Hallmark card. 

I love her. I love the thoughtful birthday presents she would carefully craft with Scotch tape, the trees she planted and watched grow as I grew, and her shrine dedicated to her two sons (my dad and my uncle). I would sit next to her orchids as she talked without end about the nights she’d spend with her friends playing dominoes. I took her passion for granted. I love how much she loved her small family. Our primary family gathering was always Christmas. She perfected every small detail; the stocking was always littered with tangerines, dinner was planned months in advance, the table was always properly set. 

My grandma carefully decorated her freshly picked Christmas tree with ornaments my dad had made when he was younger, pictures of my family, and ones gathered on trips she had taken. It was a tree gilded with the sentiment. She went to bed that night and died of a heart attack.  

These details infiltrated my frame of thought and prevented me from conceptualizing her death. I never acknowledged the fluctuating emptiness I felt inside of me (it either was vaguely present or swallowing me whole). Death seemed sublime to me (I only knew death from my middle school perspective when I had lost my closest aunt). So, I had always felt comfortable talking about it. I thought of it as a way of life, something everyone experiences. It had lost its monumental impact on my life because I had disregarded how it affected me and only thought of how she died and how everyone dies. I only thought of how it was so painful, and frankly, a beautiful way for her to pass.     

    It has taken me years to realize death is real. It’s really real. It’s not a conceptual emptiness I thought of, but it is an irreparable change. It’s a forest fire. It’s the small details of my Grammy, the moments I shared with her, the moments I couldn’t share with her, and the shitty pain of losing someone. Asserting the impact of death was something I could never do because I thought of it as a daydream. It was a thought coated in a mystified image of the sublimity of death, tunneled deep in my mind. Death is real and it’s taken multiple deaths of those closest to me to recognize. 

    I still sit by her orchids, now in my garden. I am beyond the initial impact and my life has adjusted since, but I am still to learn how to conceptualize her death. It’s a process I never allowed myself to go through.