I am sorry for your loss

My grandmother just died. My sister is getting married and my grandmother died. This is not so bad as the previous sentence might suggest. My grandmother lived most of her life in New York, while my sister and I grew up on the west coast. We did not see her or my grandfather often, and (given her "nothing is right, and you can't fix it" tendencies) visits were not very gratifying. When I lived on the east coast, I was an hour drive from her apartment, but saw her less than I saw my other grandmother, who lived a short plane flight away. This is less a testament of my lack of grand-daughterly feelings than an expression of how much more I felt for my maternal grandmother than for my father's mom.

I have a lot of stories about my grandparents, mostly ones that paint my grandmother in a less than flattering light. I pull them out in discussions about difficult relations, often trumping others with my grandmother's prickliness and self-imposed martyrdom. It doesn't feel right to share those in the wake of her death. I should be remembering that she was the youngest of nine, devoted to her parents and to New York. She was strong-willed and tougher than you'd have thought, looking at her shrunken frame. She ran a business. Even after she sunk into dementia, she smiled at pictures of Ada. Living for so long she lost so many people. I didn't know her well enough to gauge whether she had been different as a young woman, whether the disappointments of life had turned her into the woman I knew as a child.

My sister and I were never close to our grandmother. Rather than feeling the loss of this woman, we feel for our father. Losing a parent feels unbearable, at any age. My sister thinks it may be better for him to have it over. A relief. My grandmother's slow slide from ornery to senile has been hard on my dad. Still, I feel a little bad that I am not feeling more. What if no one mourns me when I go? It is ridiculous to think that by crying for my grandmother I protect my future dead self, but selfishly I do.

Just before my sister walked out the door to track down some last minute wedding details, she hugged me and said "I am sorry for your loss." I repeated the phrase, hoping it might mean something.