This blog is very, very sad. I know I hate to make you all upset, but I want to take this time to talk about my grandmother, or as I call her, Mawmaw (pictured above). Mawmaw is my grandmother on my father's side of the family. She was one of the bravest people that I know and she was in a huge part of me and my sister being raised. She was the one who became a motherly figure to me after my mother walked out on my dad. Though, Mom was still in mine and Ashley's lives, Mawmaw was the one who clothed my sister and I, she watched us during the summer, and she became my father's go-to-advice, being a single parent of two. She was the one I went to for everything... I can't even explain how it upset me when she got sick.
Five years ago, she went to my father's hometown to go take care of some business with the insurance. She was staying with her sister and they were talking to each other through the house when my great-aunt Kat heard a loud thump. She went into the room where Mawmaw was and found that she had passed out. At first they thought that she may have low blood sugar and put her on medicine for it, but... She got worse. Months passed, they went in to do some kind of surgery and that's when they found a tumor on her left ovary. From there, they diagnosed her with stage three ovarian cancer.
She went through chemo and lost her hair... She hated losing her hair. I remember when I was little, I'd go to the salon with her once a month when she got a perm. Her hair was her main priority. It's what made her, her. When it had almost marked a year since she was diagnosed, they went in, did another surgery, and she went into remission. We were so happy when that happened and everything was just perfect all over again. Everyone's lives went back to normal. She went back for a checkup a few months later and that's when they found out that the tumor had gotten worse. It had spread to her liver and that instead of it being stage three, it was now stage four. She went back into chemo. By that time, it was summer and I was able to go with her to Burlington, North Carolina with my father and sometimes my aunt. She always made us wait in the waiting room because she didn't want people see what the treatments did to her.
I'll never forget that Christmas. Everyone came home because we knew that it would probably be her last. She sat on the couch the entire time with a smile on her face. She watched as all of us grandkids (and great-grandkids) opened up the presents. The youngest child was Kade (also, pictured above). That was the night that he started trying to walk. He took his first steps in her large house where she'd lived for years.
They put in hospice in October of 2011. They told her that she had at least a month to live. She said that she wanted to make it to her birthday. I remember the days where Dad would check us out of school early so that we could travel about an hour to Durham, North Carolina where she was at. I'd sit on the couch talking to her as she asked me how school was. Her birthday was November 19th. We visited her and I wished her happy birthday. Everyone was happy and it was wonderful. My cousins had came in the spend her last few days... You could tell that she was fading fast.
On the 21st, we had gotten a phone call. I was doing my English homework and I was told that Mawmaw didn't have much time left. We were supposed to tell her that it was okay to let go and that we loved her. My sister said it with a straight face, so did my stepbrother... I was the last one to the phone and I was already crying when they gave it to me. I told her that I loved her and I repeated it over and over until Donna took the phone from my hands because she knew that it was going to upset Mawmaw if she had heard me cry. The last thing that she had ever said to me was, "I love you too, Kayla. Don't cry because everything is going to be okay."
On November 22nd, my aunt and my cousin Shane went down the road to McDonald's. They were there for ten minutes. When they got back, my great-aunt Kat was standing outside of Mawmaw's room crying. In that time that they had left to get breakfast, my grandmother had passed away. I got home that evening and my father sat us kids down. He said that he had been at the hospice all day and that at 9:20 that morning, she had passed away. He had been there when she died and she last thing she said was that he needed to watch over me and Ashley. I cried for days... I cried at her funeral even though I tried not to. I had lost the closest person to me and I couldn't take it.
Since that day, on the 19th and 22nd of November, I sit down, light a candle, and I send a silent message to her. I talk to her for a little while though I get no response and then I end it with, "I love you, Mawmaw. I miss you every single day." My cousins keep her in memory by calling the house across the road from mine (where she lived) Mawmaw Mountain... It's Mawmaw's house and she lives on the mountain.
I wanted to share this story with you not because I want to make you sad, but because I want to tell you about my grandmother. I want her memory to live on... They say that I look just like her on some occasions and I carry her with me every single day. She was the bravest woman that I ever met and she deserves to live on in the hearts of everyone.
Thank you all. I'll write another journal soon, but right now, I leave you with this....
In memory of Geraldine Keene VanDyke
November 19th, 1936 to November 22nd, 2011
