Due to my own neglect, I lost my old blog URL and the blog content that it held. I was able to salvage some of the content using archive.org. As I was writing for my Patreon last night, I had the idea to post some of those nearly lost moments here. My tentative plan is to keep an eye on my archive and post them around the same date/time in the year. So, here we go. I present to you, the night before Gigi’s moving day, a look back to 9 years ago. We were still living in Portland, but our time of caregiving Paul’s grandmother was coming to an end. We called her GG (which later morphed into Gigi).

JANUARY 3RD, 2012

I’m really tired. It’s only 10:20 pm but my vision already has that blurry, out-of-focus thing going on. Tomorrow is Grandma’s move day. I’ve got some low-level nervous energy, despite the deep desire to curl up and sleep, about the remaining ‘day of packing’ to-do list I have. We are going to have a small army of people and cars showing up tomorrow, and so I know everything will be covered. And still… niggles wriggle in my mind.

The walls are completely bare in most rooms and boxes are stacked neatly waiting for the moving crew. For those who have known Grandma’s house, it’s a profoundly strange sight. We shared our last dinner and evening with Grandma in her house.  We took a short moment to say thanks for the grace, love, and support given over the last (almost) year and a half to each other.  We enjoyed dinner as usual and with happy banter played a few hands of UNO together. There will be more dinners and more rounds of UNO… just not here and like this.

At Amira’s tuck-in – it was my turn to pray. I felt such deep gratitude for the lessons learned and the relationship built and I said so. Amira expressed sadness for GG (Amira’s nickname for her Great-Grandma) having to move and that she was going to miss having her here with us. She talked about moving in next door to GG at the assisted care apartment complex. We had to concede that GG’s soon to be neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate our bumping them out of their home. We had to remind Amira that we have many visits, shared dinners, playing games, and pool parties (there is a pool and families are welcome!) to look forward to.

Communal living changes you… from age 7 all the way to 92. It’s not always easy or fun, but it often is too… and it is most certainly stretching and deeply rewarding. There’s more to be said about this – but this will have to do for tonight.

This particular portion of our adventure is complete.  Tomorrow begins a new adventure for her and for us.

The night before Gigi’s moving day: Jan 3rd, 2012

2 thoughts on “The night before Gigi’s moving day: Jan 3rd, 2012

  • January 10, 2021 at 11:30 am
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    Save them! Save them all! I am so sorry your blog got messed up like this… you know I understand how meaningful, precious, these memories are. I hope you find more and more posts, and keep sharing them.

    • January 10, 2021 at 8:37 pm
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      Thank you, Natalie! I will. I’m finding myself annoyed with myself that I let myself lapse from keeping my blog going and up to date. I have some things captured in my journal – but it isn’t the same as how I blog. Anyway, I will be adding in the archives as I find them. 🙂 Thanks for the encouragement, as always. 🙂

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