On Monday afternoon I was snap chatting with my brother, Dillon. If you're not sure what that means, snap chat is an app you can use to send pictures back and forth with someone, I like it because the texting app I have on the island doesn't allow for picture messaging, so now I can still get daily doses of my little baby nephew and such.
So Dillon sends me a snap picture of him with a serious face asking if I had gotten any of their messages/voicemails today about Grandpa, which I hadn't gotten...we had been out of the house all day. Let me explain to you how poorly I can communicate from the island...
My iPhone does not work here. Islanders don't even know what AT&T is since its obviously not their phone providers, which is fine. So my phone stays on airplane mode all of the time. I have an app I can use when I get WIFI connection that allows to me to text message. I use sykpe and Facebook to talk to people primarily. We have an island cell phone but its long distance for my family, they don't even have the number for it, and I only use it to make calls mostly within the island. We have a home phone that's a voice over IP, but the internet connection is so slow that if anybody is using the phone (which you can only use during prime internet hours or the connection is too bad and nobody can understand you) nobody else is able to use their internet because the phone hogs all the bandwidth, its just a huge inconvenience. So long story short, if I'm not in the apartment, which I'm not a lot of the time, my family can't get a hold of me, and that has always made me nervous. Now even more so.
So I tell my brother I have not gotten any messages and ask what's up. My Grandpa May has been in and out of the hospitals for prostate cancer, his last series of tests came back negative and they sent him home to rest from all the tests and prodding and such, I believed him to be getting better. I asked my mom about it all the time and always got positive feedback from her. I felt reassured.
My brother sends me a snap and says "Grandpa had a heart attack this morning and died." I thought Dillon was kidding. I didn't believe him. I believe I literally responded saying, "That's not funny, go burn in Santa's lair" I remember this because autocorrect changed "Satan" to "Santa" and I was really annoyed, and really mad at Dillon for even joking about it. His next message said "Not joking, call me right now."
.....
I started to have a panic attack...I was immediately brought back to that moment months ago when I thought Piper was being kidnapped. My hands and legs went numb, I felt like I couldn't breathe, I felt like I wasn't moving my own legs...but thought I was like floating into the living room where Cari was on the phone with Casey and I yelled at her to hang up and give me the phone. She was confused but did as I asked and handed me the phone. I called Dillon right away and he told me what had happened. That it was all true. I couldn't contain any sort of emotion and just started to wail. I told him I had to call mom right away and I hung up. Cari stared at me with an extremely concerned and confused face as I dropped the phone onto the ground and collapsed into a ball.
"Cari, Grandpa had a heart attack this morning. He's dead."
We were both hysterical. It didn't feel real. A heart attack? But he just had cancer, and he was getting better...why would he have a heart attack?
I called my mom who was so sad and exhausted after a full day of informing people. But my mom is invincible, we've watched her suffer through the death of her daughter, and now her dad with such grace. She knows we'll see them again. Talking to her gave me enough strength to call my Grandma, that was by far the hardest phone call of the day.
The part that freaked me out the most about this was the entire previous week I'd been having dreams about him dying, and kept waking up in tears, and now I feel like it was foreshadowing and wish I'd have taken them more seriously and called my Grandpa to tell him I think about him a lot and I love him...I'll miss my Grandpa so much. He was such a quiet spoken and simple man. Every time I came to his house and left his house I got the tightest hug in the world, you could feel bones breaking inside your body, but you knew his hugs were genuine and I could feel how much he loved us grandkids.
He used to come down to the cities to stay with us for a week every other month or so and after dinner we would go into the family room and watch sports games while people cleaned up the kitchen. We figured out that if we looked engaged in the game, they wouldn't bug us to help clean. I remember once there were no games on we were familiar with, or any teams we liked, but we found an intense looking tennis match on ESPN.
Grandpa: "Do you like tennis? Do you even know who these damn girls are?"
Me: "I have absolutely no idea what's going on, or who they are."
Grandpa: "Oh well, act interested, they're almost done with the dishes anyhow."
I'm so grateful to my Grandpa for bringing my mom into the world, and raising her as he did, with such an extreme work ethic and "you'll survive this" attitude.
I'll miss his winks, his hard candy, his love of liquor and funny jokes he'd tell me when he had one too many, his cheek pinches, how much he loved my Grandma after 50+ years of marriage.
I'm happy for him that he gets to be with his brother, son, and two granddaughters in Heaven.
We'll all miss Donnie May, and laugh reminiscing of his fun spirit and wisecracks.
Here's his obituary to any interested, depicting his simplistic and beautiful life in Holdingford, Minnesota.
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| This picture was taken this summer while were home visiting, this is the last time I saw Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa gave me a hug and said he'd see me at Christmas time and that I should bring him home some Jamaican Rum, he'd heard it was good :) |
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| My mom with her mom and dad, I love this picture of them. |
