Sad news...

My grandmother Connie passed away this afternoon in Michigan after a short illness.

Her health had been deteriorating the past few years and well... I think she just found it all a little too overwhelming. She lost her long-time partner a few years ago (he passed away after a decline in health) and it seems as if she kept falling further into the past.

While she may not have been my grandmother in blood (she was my grandfather's errr... second wife), she has always made me feel no less. And she was never one of those grandmother's who treated you as a child even when you were a child.

I'll have great memories of her and her partner, Al. They would take cousins and I every year to the large Shrine Circus... She was part of my early (bug-bitten) travel trips on a train ride to Ann Arbor. Her funky house out in the country and those large, large cats (the size of medium dogs!) And her adventures in her younger years of travel and glamor were always relished.

The last time I was home, we were cleaning out some boxes and came across one from her pile that had long been forgotten. In it were old menus from trips from around the world, back in the days were dining was an event and an adventure. I know some of the menus my mom did save. And I think I may have taken a couple for myself. Now I just need to find them and collage them.

As glamorous as her days were before I was born (she and my grandfather split when I was a toddler), her later last years would become a routine. She was always cold in the large rambling house of my parents and every year I bought her these silk thermal underwear. It became a running joke in the family of when she would actually not wear them and I think we actually got her out of them before the 4th of July one year... Although we could not get her out of them at Christmas time in Florida one year.

And she was so proud of all of her grandkids and their accomplishments. She was keeping my job intact by reading the paper every day from cover to cover. And when I worked for the Detroit papers, she saved all the special sections I worked on.

I sent her cards at Christmas and for her birthday and I would get updates on her from other family members. And she had read them and in typical Connie fashion had put them in her pile of 'to do' stuff that never really seem to get smaller.

But i know in my heart, I was next.