Shelia Collier:

Unfortunately, death is a natural part of life. If we live long enough, we will most likely see the passing of many people that we love. This is especially fresh in my mind since on March 7 I lost my grandmother. She was almost 81 years old and in very poor health, but still her passing is painful. No matter how prepared you try to be for losing someone it is still difficult. My comfort is that I got to go to see her before she died.

Even with the comfort that she did what she would have wanted, I am still sad. It’s almost Easter and that to me has always been a time with my family. It’s sad to see my family slowly growing old and passing away. Death seems to put us in touch with our morality more than any other event in life. I didn’t have the same hopes and dreams and aspirations that my grandparents or my parents had but it was always comforting to know that they were still there living in the little town I left and excited to see me when I came home.

Even as life ends, those who are left have to go on. I would like to believe that the lessons that my grandmother taught me are her legacy and she is proud of me. Ultimately we want our family, our children their children to be happy. The hardest part is accepting that their way of being happy isn’t always the way we see them being happy. Letting people go, I have found is an ongoing part of life. We let our children go when they grow up, we let our elderly family go when they pass away. They in turn have spent their lives letting go of us and our parents before us. So I dedicate this article to the memory of my grandmother. She was a deeply religious woman all her life so now she is walking (no longer in a wheelchair) on streets of gold and watching over the rest of our family with new understanding.