jennanddave.com

Two weeks ago my grandpa passed away. He'd been in and out of the hospital twice over the past four or five months. It's possible to say that because of the reasons for those trips, perhaps his death wasn't entirely unexpected, that it maybe wasn't a huge surprise. It certainly doesn't make the finality of death any easier.

I've been a lucky girl. I haven't lost anyone at a time when I was of an age to really experience the sorrow of losing a family member or friend; I've either been too young or too far removed from the person to really know anything about what it feels like. My dad called me the Friday morning I was at his mom's house to tell me that Grandpa Ski (my mom's dad) had passed away. When I hung up, my grandmother asked what was going on and I told her that grandpa had died. As soon as the words were out I started crying. And I started feeling foolish which I always do when I cry in front of other people. My grandmother, however, always knows the right things to say, and as Dave told me later, she was probably the best person to be with when I heard the news.

It was a rough drive to Boston, but I was also very happy to be heading both to my parents place, where I was picking up my mom, and to Salem in general. One of the more surreal moments of the drive was realizing that less than 24 hours after his death, I was moving into an apartment in the town he grew up in. That, quite literally, we were only going to be living a few streets down from his childhood home.

When we moved here the first time six years ago, I talked with my grandpa on the phone and he told me about all of the places he used to go when he was a kid and teenager, such as taking his dates dancing down at the Willows. It was really nice to have that connection at the time, to know that even though he was down in Louisiana, we at least had Salem together.

It's so nice that for the next five months that we're here, we still do.