12.11.09

My dear Nana

Posted in News at 05:26 by nikki

My dear Nana passed away tonight, she was 91 so she lived a good life. Many of the last years she has been in a retirement home with Alzheimer’s and hasn’t known any of the family when we visited. It was a blessing in disguise given the many times my mother has been in hospital and couldn’t visit and also couldn’t tell her what was wrong, and at the same time with the whole family living dispersed over the whole country and abroad it made visits few and far between and we can only say that it was a good thing that she didn’t have a sense of time to miss us all because we were all so extremely close back when we were young and all lived in the same country. Nana was our rock and the glue that kept us all together, she was a very strong personality that we have missed for many years already.

The news wasn’t surprising but at the same time heartbreaking, she always said she’d outlive us all and promised us she’d live to be 100. We truly thought she was going to stick by that promise because Nana never ever broke a promise…but the tears and feelings of sadness have been mixed with feelings of relief tonight that she could go in a peaceful way and that she is at last reunited with her beloved husband who she lost way back in I think my mom said 1958. It’s so easy to be selfish and wish family could stay forever but when their life is physically or mentally not their own anymore and filled with more hardship than joy than you have to feel their happiness to be released.

Truth be told the past years have been a bit of a burden on my poor sick mother, it’s been heartbreaking for her to see her mother like that and to visit every chance she got and her own mother didn’t recognize her. My Mom’s health problems have not been easy on her and with the extra worry of my Nana’s boughts of sickness through the years, sometimes serious problems, other times just common colds or slight sickness but with her age it was always quite worrying. My Mom went regularly to sing for the residents and to bake for them and always around the holidays there was more things she helped them with and last week she baked some Christmas cakes with them all. It’s no doubt going to be a very strange thing for my Mom to get used to and I so wish I could be there to help her through it.

I couldn’t sleep last night, felt unexplainable pains in my abdomen yesterday, last night and a little bit less this morning. I was complaining to Rúnar and was laying in the couch feeling like I was getting sick. What also took me by surprise but I was thinking was because of the time of year was that I was being comforted by my beloved departed Freyja in my sleep. It was so real, I could see her and feel her with me. She was visiting me it seemed and I thought maybe it was because my Dad is also a bit sick at the moment. However I relived many memories of my Nana the past couple days that would pop up off and on, my mind would wonder and the memories would flood in. She was so much a part of our lives as kids and we were often more with her than we were at home because my parents worked so much when we were young. I thought I was just thinking about how sad it was that she had Alzheimer’s and didn’t remember us and that Rúnar never got to meet her as she was.  I always get a bit nostalgic and miss my family around Christmas. I wasn’t reading the signs of the past few days or was refusing to see the connection until I got the call from my Mom tonight and she said Nana probably wouldn’t live through the night. I realized that I’d known she was leaving us for a few days and her energy was with me, then I got a very strange feeling tonight, an sudden urge to call my Mom back but my phone battery needed recharging. Then I got a tingling in my head followed by feeling that the pain and heaviness I was feeling all day was gone. I finally gave in to the urge and called around 9-9:30 (their time) but my step-father answered and said my Mom was at the retirement home and that he had some bad news. My Nana had died about 8:00.

I won’t be able to say goodbye to her, so I’m counting on the fact that she too would have felt the energy I was sending her through my thoughts of her lately and especially today. I know my Mom gave her a hug and said goodbye for all of us. Like my other family members who have passed on during the years I never get to be at their funerals or to hug my family in these times of mutual sorrow. I often feel their sorrow is deeper than mine because I’ve missed so many years of the lives of my loved ones but much of my sorrow is exactly because of the years I’ve lost. Regrets that can’t be erased. My life situation always seems to be that finances and distance cannot be overcome, no matter how I wish they could. My thoughts will be with my loved ones and I think I will sit down and write my dear Nana a poem tomorrow. I’ve always done that for the loved ones I lose, it’s the only way I can tell them how much I loved them and how much they meant to me. I hope I get one finished before she is laid to rest.

I talked to my Mom on MSN tonight after she got home and I could see from her comments that she was happy for her Mom to finally be at peace, she reminded me that there are others meeting her at the rainbow bridge including my little Tryggvi. I thought how wonderful it is that my mother has her faith to help her through and it will help me to not worry so much about her. She made it a point to be positive and to tease me with the little nudges and silly characters that we often send to each other on MSN, she made me smile and I will continue to smile whenever I think of my Nana now. Rest in peace Nana, I love you more than words can say.

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