Sad

Shrike's grandmother died this morning. Her husband, children and their spouses were all at her bedside.

It wasn't unexpected - she'd been on hospice since around Christmas, and there have been at least half a dozen "you'd better come see her today" phone calls - but one never thinks that today is going to be the day.

We've been trying to prepare Peeper, when things first got bad, we started talking to her about "Grandma S*'s body wearing out" and she immediately made the connection to GirlCat. (The was while BoyCat was still with us.)

She's been just rocking along, so we haven't really said much more about it to Peeper, but she'd taken a turn for the worse in the past few days, so I told her last night that Grandma S's body was going to stop working very soon, and this morning we said it again, more explicitly, and told her it would probably be happening within a few days.

Little did we know that, as we were saying that, it had probably already happened.

There will be a visitation Thursday evening and the funeral is Friday morning. For our own selfish purposes, we are pleased with the arrangements, because we won't have any conflicts with Peeper's first day of Mother's Day Out. I was worried that Shrike was going to find herself with two places that she absolutely must be at the same time.

We've really not yet decided at what level Peeper will participate in those events, but we'll sort that out as we learn more details.

I just hope that we handle it all the right way with her.

*When I asked Shrike if it was okay to blog about this, she just asked me not to use her Grandma's name, but I do feel like I should say that S doesn't stand for her last name, it stands for her nickname, by which she universally known. Over the past several months, in particular, we've referred to her as Grandma S___ to Peeper, as opposed to Grandma Lastname, when differentiating from "Grandma-in-Texas," just because it's more fun, I guess.  

I started making it a point to use her name, and not just "Grandma" when it occurred to me that every time I referred to Anonymama as just plain "Grandma," sometimes even in the context of a visit to Texas, Peeper would ask "What kind of Grandma?" It took me a while to realize that she meant "Which Grandma?" I can be kind of slow sometimes.