Last year in April, I went to Sweden to surprise my mother who was coming home from a vacation where she had celebrated her 50th birthday. I was in Sweden for a week. On April 5th, we went to my grandmothers house. She had been at the hospital for a while and could finally come home that day. Grandma didn’t know that I was coming to Sweden, nobody except my dad knew. She was full of medication and was talking about all sort of weird stuff. Hilarious stories about her champagne parties when she was young. I just sat there next to her and held her hand, listened and laughed. Every time I came to see her the last few years, she was always happy, smiled and behaved like the grandma I know. I’ve never really seen the other side of her that my family and relatives talked about. I’ve seen her in pain, but not in the way I’ve been told she could show it. She wrote letters to me and told me about the pains in her body and how lonely she felt, but she never wanted to show it to me in person. So, I only remember her for the good times. I felt that this would be my last time I would see her. On the plane back to America I could not stop thinking about her. This feeling was so strong and I hated it, but at the same time this allowed me to work on my feelings of her being gone one day before it was reality and it made the actual passing in July easier for me.
It’s hard to be so far away from family and relatives. I haven’t seen most of my cousins in many years, I’ve never even met some of their children or partners. I miss my other grandmother a lot and I would love to spend more time with my aunts and their families. Emails, facebook or actual letters helps of course but it’s not bringing me closer to them. I don’t know when my next visit to Sweden will be, it may not even be this year. I feel bad for living so far away and that I don’t visit them more often. But, they are not visiting me either, so…
Now I know how it is to loose someone and how much I wish that I would have seen her more before she died. I constantly think about that I’m not spending enough time with my family and relatives, but there’s not much I can do about it. I live here. They live there. Flights are not free and travel takes time. I’ll see them when I see them.
Picture from August 2013, right before my wedding