grandmother death essay

The Death of My Grandmother and Lessons Learnt Essay

Introduction.

For many people, the death of their grandparents means the loss of a very close relative, who was given an important role in their lives. After the death of a grandmother, a person can experience many different emotions. The loss of a dear person is frightening and unsettling. Often the loss of a grandmother is the first loss in life, which only complicates the feelings experienced. Death is a natural part of life that we have to deal with sooner or later. The loss of my grandmother was the biggest tragedy that has happened to me. The main reason is the fact that she was the one who raised me to become who I am. She was closer to me than my parents because they were mostly busy at their jobs. My grandmother always accompanied me throughout my childhood.

Nonetheless, the given obstacle was a mere setback for my future success. At first, I was inclined to be pessimistic and depressed due to the fact that I did not see myself enjoying life anymore. As time passed, I began to realize that I am the only one who can and will carry on her legacy and memory because she raised me by pouring her soul into me. In addition, I started to appreciate life more because I faced the concept of death early on.

I learned many valuable things after my grandmother passed away. The best way to feel better after the death of a loved one is to indulge in pleasant memories. I tried to remember the moments when we laughed together, had fun, or other pleasant situations that we experienced with my grandmother. Also, over time, I could revise our box or album of memory, so as not to forget about all the moments experienced. I realized that if you focus on helping others, it will be easier for you to survive the loss and move on. It is also critical to support the parents and brothers during difficult moments. Some of your parents have lost their mother, and this is a terrible obstacle. I learned to recall that I love my loved ones and try to take care of them even in small endeavors, such as offering to make tea or washing the dishes. It is important to experience the joy that my grandmother lives in my memory.

Furthermore, I learned that there are several stages that each person experiencing loss goes through shock, anger, despair, and acceptance. As a rule, these stages take a year, and it is no accident that in the old traditions, the mourning for the deceased lasted as long. These experiences are individual and depend on the degree of closeness with the deceased person, on the circumstances in which he passed away. At each stage, there may be experiences that seem abnormal to people. For example, they hear the voice of a deceased person or feel his presence. They may remember the departed, dream about him, may even be angry with the deceased, or, conversely, not experience any emotion. These conditions are natural and are due to the functioning of the brain. However, it is important to know that pathological reactions to stress can occur at each stage.

In conclusion, I firmly believe that the loss of my grandmother was a major challenge that I faced in my entire life. Although it dealt irreparable damage, I am convinced that it made me much stronger as a human being both emotionally and mentally. I acquired a certain degree of peace and calmness during stressful periods because none of them can be as painful as the loss of my grandmother. In addition, I became more aware of the concept of death, which forced me to fully appreciate my time and life.

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Home Essay Samples Health Death

Reflections on the Death of a Loved One

Table of contents, introduction, the shock and sorrow: initial reactions to the death of a loved one, the process of grief: navigating life after loss, life lessons from death: a new perspective, works cited.

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Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Death — Death of a Loved One as a Life-Changing Moment

Death of a Loved One as a Life-changing Moment

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Published: Aug 4, 2023

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Experiencing the Death of a Loved One

The loss of my loved grandmother.

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Here’s to the grandmothers who have shaped generations of women and mothers

AlessandroBiascioli/Shutterstock

In light of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I am reminded of the passing of my own grandmother and the importance of grandmothers all across the globe.

By Mariah Maddox September 12, 2022

The loss of a grandmother is never an easy one to deal with. In light of the death of Queen Elizabeth II , I am reminded of the passing of my own grandmother and the importance of grandmothers all across the globe. 

In many ways, I still have not found rest in the fact that my grandmother is gone—and for people who have lost their grandmothers, I’m sure you can relate.

Related: How to deal with loss of grandmother

I saw how deeply many across the world began to mourn when Queen Elizabeth II passed away—and in a way, it resurfaced the ache of the loss of my own grandmother that I have been trying to avoid for so long.

The world seemingly stops for just a moment when the matriarch of our family passes. And when it starts to move again, it never orbits the same.

It’s as if I have tried and tried to regain my footing after her loss. Yet the grief fills and surrounds me —and I have never been the same. The world has never been the same.

Because grandmothers are the anchors of families. They are the ones who hold everything together, who remind us of the names that we carry and of where we come from.

Grandmothers are the ones who make us draw near to our lineage and find glory in the blood that runs through our veins. They keep family at the center of their lives—and their hearts—and stand true to the precious and cherished bonds of kin. 

Related: I love seeing my child develop personal relationships with family members

The love that grandmothers hold is deeper and fuller than anything we have ever known—and we are drawn into their orbit of love, laughter and light.

So when we lose a grandmother, it feels like we lose a monumental piece of ourselves. The world seemingly stops for just a moment when the matriarch of our family passes. And when it starts to move again, it never orbits the same.

But the reassuring and warming thing for me is that I get to honor my grandmother in living the wisdom she so often instilled in me. In her days on this Earth, she lived a full and meaningful life.

Related: Our kids have the best Nana and Grandma in the world—thank you

Every day I am reminded of her embrace, of her grace and her beauty and her poise.

I am reminded of how her aura warmed every person that she came in contact with and how her presence commanded every space that she walked into. 

She walked the path before us—my mother, my aunts, my sisters, me—and she reached back to guide us on our individual journeys. In many ways, her spirit still guides us.

Even though their passings bring an unbearable burden of grief, we now have the baton to carry.

And I know that one day, I want to be that woman. The matriarch of my family. The woman who my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to seek wisdom from. The woman who reminds them of their lineage, of their purpose. 

One day, I will be that woman, and I am sure of it because my grandmother taught me so many valuable things. And though I have spent many days in mourning since her passing, I am reminded of the morning she carried all the days of her life. Those recollections ease my weeping heart in times like these and remind me that there is still work to be done. Now a deeper purpose is awaiting me—and that is to carry on the legacy that my grandmother sowed into all the women that she raised.

Related: Being a grandmother is the greatest joy of my life

So if you are reading this, take a moment to honor your grandmother—living or passed away. Honor the grandmothers who gave us our heritage. Honor the grandmothers who sacrificed so that we could be the women we are today. Honor the grandmothers who walked the path before us. Honor the grandmothers who are the glue that binds us all together.

A coworker of mine mentioned the loss of a grandmother as the sentiment of a loss of generations of elders, of a moving up of generations. And I find that sentiment to be achingly true, but also reassuring.

Because grandmothers have shaped generations of women and mothers—and even though their passings bring an unbearable burden of grief, we now have the baton to carry.

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What My Grandmother Knew About Dying

There are essentially two kinds of physicians: those who want to fix things and those who want to help people deal with things that can’t be fixed. I became a geriatrician and palliative-care doctor because I like being with people when the hard stuff goes down. I like organizing a plan, untangling the knot of someone’s suffering even just a bit. I like having something to offer.

What I understood after a few years of taking care of the very sick and dying is that most people can’t say what they want or what they care about when they’re nearing the end: they’re overwhelmed, or in pain, or delirious. If you’re going to be useful to someone in that moment, it’s best if you’ve talked beforehand about what might happen. I learned to gently engage people in picturing their own decline and near-demise, and to ask what would be most important to them in those moments. Would they want to die at home, receive CPR, have a feeding tube? Would they prefer to be with certain people, to be blessed with certain prayers, to listen to a specific song?

I’ve been with families for some very nice deaths, planned to perfection like weddings. One older woman I adored, whom I’ll call Ellen, died at home, surrounded by roses, dressed in a fur coat—ideal. I felt good about how clear and firm I had been in articulating the reality of Ellen’s prognosis, and proud of the things that her daughters and I arranged to make her final weeks meaningful and comfortable: manicures, favorite movies, photo albums, and opioids. Ellen got it all because she didn’t shrink from existential distress. She died having told all her grandchildren that she loved them, in letters that she took the time to write and leave in envelopes in her desk.

In my family, it’s different. No one has shared a vision for the end of their lives, or written a living will. I’ve failed entirely to get conversations about these things going—partly for the same reasons that surgeons don’t operate on their loved ones, but largely because, in my family, there is a staunch refusal to acknowledge the mortal coil. My close relatives barely acknowledge having bodies. When felled by illness in various ways, they’re mystified but incurious, irritated but not despairing, and in utter disbelief that things can really go south.

My grandmother, Harriet, became engaged to my grandfather, Lou, after they’d dated for two weeks. Whenever anyone asked how she knew, she would say, “He was a hunk.” Lou was frequently ill and died at fifty-seven. I didn’t know Harriet then and can’t picture her grief, but she never dated anyone after him. She would speak of him with a very specific tenderness that conveyed, every time, that he was the love of her life.

She and Lou raised three kids in Toronto from the fifties to the seventies. When her kids were in their teens, she became obsessed with West Highland terriers, jaunty little white dogs. She had them first as pets, then became a breeder, and then got on the dog-show circuit, as a contender and a judge. When I was very little, she had a kennel in her basement, with puppies barking in pens. I could tug ropes on a pulley system to open the doors of the enclosures and let the terriers run free behind her house.

When she was in her mid-sixties, Harriet said enough with the dogs and decided to pursue acting. This wasn’t a hobby for her; it was a vocation, a dream she’d harbored since high school. She got an agent and started going to auditions. She was in several commercials and plays, and she has a reel on YouTube. Was she good? I honestly have no idea. Onstage, she always seemed so much like herself to me: robust, dramatic, annoying, self-involved, charismatic, loving. She took her jobs seriously and fretted when they dried up. She wanted to get cast enough times to qualify for a Canadian Actors’ Guild membership, and, eventually, she did.

About a decade ago, when she was eighty-four, Harriet was hospitalized for an elective procedure and suffered a string of serious complications. I flew home to see her in the intensive-care unit, where she was sitting with a non-invasive ventilation mask covering her face and forcing oxygen into her body. Many older patients in this situation become delirious, or at least anxious and scared. Not my grandmother. As I leaned in to take her hand, she pulled the mask away from her face with surprising strength and said, “Can you believe I’m in here? I was up for a part in ‘Dumb and Dumber 2.’ ”

That hospitalization lasted several weeks. Then Harriet recovered. She kept living alone. She seemed to be evading death by simply refusing to acknowledge its possibility. When I would visit, she would roll her eyes and say things like “Getting old is no fun, kiddo!” She would ask for my professional input as a physician into her various ailments, but then beam throughout my replies and listen to none of it. Her primary-care physician was old, too, and she felt that he was a very good doctor, but this was mostly because he always called on her birthday.

Most illness is experienced as a scatterplot of symptoms and challenges, not as a straight and sudden decline. This is what makes prognostication difficult and caretaking so gruelling: in addition to being sad, expensive, and exhausting, being responsible for a sick or aging loved one is also unpredictable. Our minds play tricks on us, so that signs of degeneration can go unnoticed for years and then come into focus as harbingers of doom. There are good days and bad ones, but it’s most important to keep your eye on the slope of the curve.

For a long while, Harriet’s curve was bending downward. She spent the pandemic in her apartment in Toronto, mostly alone. She relied on oxygen at night and sometimes during the day. She was also lucid, mentally energetic, and blessedly tech-savvy. She subsisted largely on maple cookies and crackers with marmalade. She was doing O.K., until she wasn’t.

At the end of January, Harriet was admitted to the hospital with new shortness of breath, initially attributed to an exacerbation of a chronic lung issue and a mild pneumonia. After a few days, she developed an internal bleed, and her blood count remained stubbornly low even after it was addressed. She needed blood transfusions as a result, and then diuresis so that her stiff heart would be able to handle the additional fluid.

The essence of geriatric medicine is the anticipation of cascading health problems like the ones that Harriet was facing. “Frail” is a colloquial term used to describe little old ladies, but frailty is also a clinical syndrome that affects more than just our bones and muscles. With time and stress, our internal organs and biological systems become worn, brittle, less resilient to infections and injuries, more susceptible to toxicities. Sick bodies usually have multiple problems, and, over time, these problems become intertwined. Heart failure leads to kidney failure, which worsens the heart failure, which makes breathing feel more labored. A mind that’s slipping away might mean that a person forgets how to provide their own basic hygiene, gets new infections, takes antibiotics, and becomes more confused from the medication’s side effects. When people speak of “dying of old age,” this type of spiral is usually what they mean. Aging alone doesn’t kill us.

After a week in the hospital, Harriet was too weak to sit up on the side of her bed. On the phone, her voice sounded faint and slow. My mother couldn’t visit her because of isolation protocols, and the hospital was stretched for staffing. As the days went on, I became more anxious not just that we might lose her but that we might lose her inside, alone, away from us. Her doctors kept looking for ways to fix her. I felt that I could see the big picture better than they could. She wasn’t going to be easily fixed, and I wanted to get her home.

I tried, with little success, to get Harriet to tell me what she wanted. Midway through her hospitalization, we discussed the prospect of a colonoscopy, which her doctors had proposed to look for another source of the bleeding. I thought the rationale for something so invasive was dubious, and that the potential complications were a clear reason to decline. Harriet wouldn’t say no, but she also wasn’t saying, as some of my patients have in the past, that she wanted to “do everything.” Instead she said she’d think about it, and asked how my baby was doing. “ Thank you for calling, my darling,” she said in her diminished voice, as we got off the phone.

Technically, Harriet’s attitude is called denial. But denial was one of her best survival strategies, a way of having a fine time even when things were not fine at all. This was a woman who loved being alive, even as her life became more constrained. Alone in the hospital, miserable, sleepless, barely eating, bruised and bleeding, she behaved as though she were merely unhappy, jet-lagged on a layover. Her will to live was primal and powerful. She was lucid through everything. She was a complete miracle in this way: her brain never got cloudy, because it refused to track the weather of her body.

At the end of the second week of Harriet’s hospitalization, my extended family met on Zoom to talk about bringing her home. She had received many medical interventions in the past ten days, but she was also worse than she had been upon entering the hospital in the first place. Twelve people representing two generations, ages twenty-nine to seventy, were on the call. Some were in Israel, some in the United States, some in Canada. A few of my cousins had been in touch with my grandmother every day for years, and her absence from the grid of faces was discomforting. No one wanted to have a meeting about Harriet without Harriet.

Family meetings are considered the palliative-care practitioner’s core procedure. An experienced facilitator listens more than she talks, and then summarizes, clarifies, and organizes; her job isn’t to tell the family what to do, but to help them articulate it for themselves. I forgot all my practiced communication techniques when speaking to my own family members, tripped up by my intimacy with the patient and with them. I monologued, with pauses for questions. I explained Harriet’s medical situation and emphasized that her doctors hadn’t found much that they could treat to cure. I talked about bringing her home to take care of her in the most essential sense: to feed her the soup she wanted from a specific Jewish restaurant, to cajole her into taking bites. I said we could always change our minds if things got much worse or much better. I didn’t know how long she had, but didn’t we want to be with her while we could? Everyone agreed that we did, not because I’d demonstrated skill in guiding them toward that decision, but because we all loved the same dynamic, maddening woman in the same devoted way. I booked a flight to Toronto that day.

The beautiful death at home —with luxuries, like roses or furs, or simply in comfort and safety—is hard to come by, even for those who want it. It’s almost impossible for people who do not have family or friends who can devote significant time and resources to caring for them; it’s completely impossible for people who do not have homes. It’s sometimes impossible for reasons related to the dying process itself: a person can be suffering too much to be treated safely at home, or need the attention of more people than a family can afford to have at the bedside. In the U.S., if you elect to enroll in home hospice, you typically must forgo any interventions that are considered disease-modifying or life-extending. This is a choice forced by health-care economics and reductive ideas about the line between living and dying. Practically, it means that people delay preparing for death at home so they can continue to receive physical therapy, or try one more round of chemo.

Harriet, in her refusal to engage with goals of care, hadn’t articulated a wish for the beautiful death at home. Nonetheless, I hoped one was possible. She was dwindling, not suffering. We had plenty of family around interested in taking part in her care. Her apartment could be reconfigured to accommodate new ways of living. We could afford to supplement the services provided by Ontario’s public-insurance benefits, which are more flexible and generous than what one typically gets in the U.S., and we had a network of contacts who could help us get what we needed even in the midst of the pandemic. Still, it took days to organize the hospital bed, the commode, the aides who would teach us to care for her body, the referrals from social work, the prescriptions, the appointments. During that time, Harriet remained in the hospital, getting weaker.

Four of us went over to the apartment to prepare for her return. We paused as we organized her room to show one another the sublime and the ridiculous things that we found. Sublime: a letter that Lou’s dear friend had written to my mother and her siblings after Lou died, saying how much he had loved my grandfather. Ridiculous: a tiny clay pot filled with brooches shaped like sunglasses. Proustian: several bottles of White Shoulders perfume, all partially used.

Finally, Harriet came home. The most striking thing was how much she looked like her mother, whom I called Nanny Annie, who died at the age of ninety-five. Her facial structure seemed not just thinner or older but rearranged from her own; she looked exactly like Annie. I sent a photo to my cousins, who agreed that the resemblance was not just uncanny but new. None of us had seen it before. I had the strange sensation of being in a play in which an older performer replaces a younger one to show that time has passed.

The character in the bed was still Harriet, though, changed but undiminished. My sister Ella has said that our grandmother was always authentically herself, even if she was also constantly performing the role of herself, for her pleasure and ours. “That was a nightmare,” Harriet told me, referring to her time in the hospital. Her grip was stronger than I had imagined. She let me swab the dead skin off her lips and moisten her mouth with a little sponge on a stick; she let me gently wipe the gunk that had built up between her eyelashes and examine places where her skin was breaking down. “You’re a good doctor, Rach,” she said, as I helped her turn her tiny body.

She asked me to read her a draft of this essay, which I had started writing the night after we’d had the fraught conversation about the colonoscopy. We both teared up as I read, she when I mentioned my grandfather, I when I talked about her dying. She asked me to take out something I’d written that was “a secret.” But Harriet was pleased, and said she wanted the piece to be published. Over the next few days I listened to various family members sit with her, and heard her speak about the past more fulsomely than I remembered her doing before. She attended, without conscious intention, to what the palliative-care doctor Ira Byock has called the five tasks of the dying: saying I’m sorry, saying I forgive you, saying thank you, saying I love you, saying goodbye. She reminisced, and apologized for small and big things. She expressed satisfaction in the resolution of old conflicts. She said she missed my grandfather. She told everyone she loved them, and thanked us for taking care of her. When we’d try to leave her to rest, she’d hold our hands and tell us to stay. She didn’t want to miss anything.

About a week after Harriet came home, my mother called to tell me that her oxygen was low. Harriet looked weak over FaceTime. “Will I live?” she asked me, a more direct question than any she had ever posed before. “Well, not forever,” I joked. She smiled and said, “True.” She died at 2:45 A.M. the next day, holding hands with my aunt Nicki and Norma, the care worker who was spending the nights with her.

There is a current of personality in my family that extends from Harriet to her children to my sisters and cousins and me. I see it in my daughter, too. We all vibrate at a specific frequency, which we jokingly call the Life Force. We share a vigorous curiosity, a confident way of thinking, a sureness that we bring the action with us. At Harriet’s eightieth birthday party, in a private room at a chic downtown hotel, all her children and grandchildren raised their glasses and toasted her with the cry, “Big ups to the Life Force!” Everyone thought this was funny, and everyone meant it.

I have often remarked that I didn’t go into medicine to simply bear witness, but the work has a way of forcing you to do just that. Even with foresight and the most careful attention, you cannot plan on grace, or force closure; you cannot practice someone’s last words in advance. People die as they live and live as they are. Harriet didn’t intend to die at all, and yet she did so in a way that perfectly reflected her spirit and charisma. How did she manage it? To be with my immortal grandmother through her last breath made death and dying strange to me anew; in losing Harriet, I had never felt so close to her.

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