Grandma's Death

The weekend before we going to leave on our trip to go to Cuba we found out that Grandma Helen wasn't doing well. On Friday they did some tests indicating that she had pneumonia in her lungs and she had a stroke leaving her one side paralyzed. She wasn't eating much over the weekend and Sunday she seemed to be doing better. She wanted to eat a little bit and was still pink in colour. On Monday, however she died in her sleep just after eating her lunch. I was able to get the kids I babysat home and Jamie came home so I could go be with mom as she waited for the doctor to come to pronounce her dead (he said he had been there earlier in the morning and she seemed fine). We packed up her things in her room into a couple of containers (she didn't have much there but clothes, personal items and a few pictures on the wall). Grandma was 100 years and 10 months old, almost 101 years old.

The next day, Mom and I meet with the funeral home and arrange when the funeral would be. We were able to arrange for the funeral on Thursday morning with the lunch afterwards in the basement of the funeral home just before we had to leave for Toronto later that night. We picked out some flowers by co-ordinating colours from one of grandma's quilts that we were going to drape over the casket. There was lots of things to do and thankfully Jamie's parents were able to take Ethan for me for a couple of days. I helped mom go through all the photos to make a collage of grandma's life and started writing my euology at 10 pm Wednesday night. It was totally God inspired as it only took me 2 1/2 hours to write and writing is not my forte.

The day of the funeral there were about 35 people who came. Quite a few of mom's new family came down for the funeral and the rest were friends of mom and dad's. Grandma didn't have many friends left as she out lived them all.

After we got back from Cuba, we had another little service in Sarnia on Tuesday January 24th. We hadn't gotten in contact with the minister from Grandma's old church in Sarnia although Mom was in contact with her before we left for Cuba. She did finally get a call on Mom's cell phone as we were on our way there which was a relief for me as it looked like I was going to have to do the service at that point. We quickly found a flower place so we could put some on her casket and did a stop at Tim Horton's before going to the cementary.

Grandma was buried next to my grandfather in Lakeview Cementary in Sarnia. It was quite weird though as mom's biological mother and her mother were only 50 ft away from each other. The service was only about 15 minutes but Pastor Carol did a great job. At this service, there were another 18-20 people at the graveside service. Two were mom's new family, then one half of them mom's friends from Sarnia and the rest were Grandma's sister Joyce's family. We had lunch at a little Irish Pub right by all the big ships docked for the winter (my grandpa was a wheels man when he was younger).