A Reason to Be Thankful

Last year, several of my Facebook friends made (or at least tried to make) daily "Today I am thankful for..." posts throughout the month of November. I made a mental note that I wanted to try to do that this year. Of course, I forgot about it until I started seeing my friends' posts this year, and it seemed like a cop-out to start a few days late. So I put it on my calendar for next year, and decided instead to do a blog post on November 30 entitled "30 Reasons to Be Thankful."

Change in plans.

My blog post for today will be about my great-aunt, who passed away early this morning. I have many more than 30 reasons to be thankful that she was a part of my life.

My cousin, who writes an awesome and far more consistently updated blog than I do, mentioned in one of her posts that she barely knew her mother's father, who died when we were young. I vaguely remember learning that he had died, but I don't really remember him at all. I know a lot of people, including my mother, that never met at least one of their four grandparents. In comparison, I had an embarrassment of riches, because I had not four, but five.

My great-aunt was very much a third grandmother: my Confirmation sponsor, daily homework helper, and the provider of Wrigley's Spearmint Gum, which she would chew a half-stick at a time. I would kneel at the coffee table in our family room, writing the answers to my Social Studies questions as she read them from my textbook. Afterwards, we would work together on word search puzzles, or play 500 Rummy. She taught me to do cryptograms and Fill-Ins, but she wouldn't let me read her Harlequin romance novels.

I'm struggling with losing her today, but the hardest part is feeling like I lost her a long time ago. Today is simply the last step on our journey away from each other, over the miles that I've traveled across the country and the distance that illness put between me and the great-aunt that I knew. For her, it's the first step on the journey that will someday bring us back together again.