Jess and Jeremy

I write to process feelings.  I always have.  I have a personal little private blog that I use as a journal.  Tonight for some reason, I was reading through old posts and I came across this one from June.  Grandma passed away in December and this day is still clear in my mind.  I'm glad I took the time to write about it so that it always will be.  Not sure why I felt compelled to share.  I'm fairly certain this is basically a private blog as well, but nonetheless, I post:

I love you Grandma.

I think in life, we don't take enough advantage of learning a bit from those who have been through it all before. I talk to my mom a lot and I like to talk to friends and co-workers, but I realized today that I really don't take enough opportunity to hear what my elders really have to say. I think that we often end up seeing visits to grandparents as somewhat of a chore unfortunately. I feel bad even saying it but I think it is true.

I went to visit my grandma today in the hospital in Ogden. Her hair is thinning, almost gone really, her legs are frail and thin, her arms are bruised and swollen from the chemo and the needle pricks. But her eyes were still the same. Her voice was still my grandma. Of course, she said that she didn't want me to have come, she wanted to save me the trip and the time, but her eyes told a different story. It was a couple of hours in my life, but had I not made the trip, I may have never known that my grandma had her reception for her wedding as a house-warming party with the oddest guest list ever. The first to arrive were the parents of her ex-husband, followed by church clergy, beer salesmen, businessmen, bartenders, and everything in between. Grandpa Ted spent the majority of the affair passed out in the bedroom after being delivered home by his friends from the bar. She told me about Grandpa Ted's logging adventures and about how she would follow him to the site in the pickup and run to town for supplies and about the time he wowed her with his ability to navigate out through the forest using his intuition alone only to find out later that he had marked the trees in the path along the way. She talked about the Saturday mornings in Ventura when she would take my mom and uncles to the beach for a picnic and because of the fog, would end up back at home in the backyard eating their chicken and salads. We talked about my mom and dad and about sadness and frustration over how things ended up. She told me how proud she was of me, told me to enjoy the moments of my life, and to be careful not to wish them away.

I walked out of the hospital this morning with an indescribable happiness. One that comes from knowing that you made someone's day, one that comes from the joy of being tied to something way bigger and longer lasting than just yourself - a happiness that I don't ever allow myself to enjoy enough. I could have justified for a thousand reasons for not taking the few hours to drive up there. Lord knows that I have a million things on my to-do list before leaving to go out of town on Monday, between the wedding and everything else. But I would have really missed out if I hadn't gone. It makes me wonder how many other amazing experiences that I miss out on by justifying not doing it - by being too busy and caught up in the things that really ultimately don't matter, only to sacrifice the moments and things in life that do.

Another element to the whole big puzzle I suppose.....I think that I need to make a pretty big effort to look at the things in my life that I spend my time doing and evaluate which of those things really matter. Granted, I do love to work, I love to be a busy body, but I think a good inventory of where I spend my time in relationship to my actual priorities is not a bad idea. I may be surprised where I am wasting energy that could be spent on my happiness!