Laid to Rest



I wish a picture could capture and words describe what this feels like for me: plush green grass to stretch out on and my grandma's handmade quilt liberated from a box to live in nature and participate in memory-making again ♥

I posted this picture and caption on Facebook 4 days before. This quilt, the fact that my grandmother made it with her hands, and I was giving it a new life... It has all been very profound to me on this journey. Almost every day I spread it in the grass and lay on it, and the bright colors in contrast to the grass, and the comfort it provides -- they have been one of the highlights of the journey so far.

I posted this picture on Facebook 4 days before my grandmother passed away. I did not know my grandmother very well. I heard she was a firecracker all her life, and I know she had a lot of healing to do, which made her absent most of my life (until I was an adult). I spent very little time with her, and most recently, it was very difficult, as her beginning stages of dementia made what I thought would be an amazing intergenerational experience a sad and frustrating visit. She died thinking I didn't like her. Now it is too late to tell her that she just stirred me in uncomfortable personal ways, places that I wasn't ready to grow yet.

Because I didn't have a lot of memories with her, my first initial reaction was that I have now lost the last of a whole generation in my life. What a big open space that just created.

Because I didn't have a lot of memories with her, I am saddest for the stories that have been silenced and never told. Her stories. Her family's stories, that I will never know now. I am sad for the memories that could have been made.

This has all been laid to rest.

And today, on this quilt, I lay to rest, during the most alive and thriving time of my life. And this quilt, made by the hands of my grandmother, is an integral part of this experience and adventure.

I honor her by living with this quilt.

I honor her by taking the time to stretch and grow in the ways I wasn't ready to before.

Maybe I will do it while laying on her quilt, wrapped in her love, knowing she is still around, if not in the physical. And she is with me to still process all this stuff.

Be in peace, Grandma Sylvia ♥