Less than 500 words – that have taken me a year, and half a box of tissues, to write.

✨Joy Freda West: 13 August 1935 – 30 August 2022✨

Content Warning: Reflections on my Grandmother’s Death, from my perspective.

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You gave me life. And in your death, you gave me your greatest gift. That precious hour spent with your body after you’d left it. Spent with you after you’d left this world. The silent stillness of the hospital room where you’d exhaled your last peaceful breath, surrounded by family – as you’d wanted to be. With Grandad on the other side, waiting for you twenty years to come. 

Me stuck on the motorway. Was Mercury Retrograde that day? Couldn’t decide whether or not to make the journey to see you. I knew that you were leaving, but I wasn’t sure what I’d be coming for. Was it to make everyone else feel better? Or to make myself look good? Neither of those felt like strong enough reasons for me to be there. But when I realised – It’s to say Goodbye – then I knew. I knew I had to be there and I understood.

And as you lay there, fading in and out, making prayers for all your loved ones, moving ever closer towards those who’d gathered to guide you on than the ones who’d gathered to let you go, I set out on the journey that took me longer than ever before. 

Stopping for lunch, getting lost, redirected, finding our way back. You breathed and prayed and slowed and faded. And you’d gone. Before we came. You tried to hold on. You’d waited for days, while I wasted time and finally decided – too late – to make my move. You couldn’t stay. Your body relaxed, and released you from its last painful grasp. 

But you didn’t leave. Because when I arrived shortly after, you were still there. Fingers soft, white and waxy. Lips drained of colour and life; eyes closed. 

I held your hand. Pulled a healing card for you and laid it on your belly: The Temple of the Sun. The strength of your spirit and the stone steps as you ascend into the light. 

And in our few precious moments alone together, I spoke to you and thanked you. I thanked you for giving me life, and for taking away in your death some of the stories and hurt and pain that we have carried in our family for too long. 

The veil was at its thinnest in that room than I have ever known it. 

To reach in for that moment and touch your death. To be gifted with this privilege as you passed between. To realise then, that I wasn’t late. I had come exactly as intended. To know this honour, this power, of life as it is ending, of death as it’s beginning – this threshold of magnificence that words cannot describe.