Something like an eulogy

This weekend I lost my pen pal.

I don’t receive an awful lot of post, and when I do it tends to be nothing more exciting than a bank statement. For as long as I can remember I have written letters to Joan in Scotland, and she has written back, as her poor hearing meant we didn’t have much luck communicating on the phone.
Joan is my grandmother, but she’s never been “granny” – it sounded old and unfashionable, and she was never either of those things.

Despite being a few weeks from her 91st birthday, I rather naively imagined that Joan would never die, or at least not so soon. I’m a little fuzzy on dates and time frames but I understand that she was in hospital, I wrote to her, she wrote to me, she came out of hospital, I wrote, she wrote, she went back in and it didn’t strike me as very serious, I wrote, I wrote, then the doctors said she was dying.
It didn’t seem possible. I hadn’t made the visit I thought about for months, she hadn’t met my boyfriend, I hadn’t sent her a photo of my new blonde hair colour (her response to my ever-changing do was that “Gentlemen prefer blondes.”) Selfishly, I wasn’t ready for Joan to die.

The day after the news, I got the train to Dumfries, meeting my dad during one of the changes.
When we got to the hospital, I knew the second I caught a glimpse of her that Joan wasn’t the woman I had known anymore. No possible description could avoid sounding shocking, and the image haunts me. Joan was much better than the pain she would have been in without the morphine. I only stayed in Scotland for a little over 24 hours – there was nothing I could have done besides making peace with what was going to happen. The doctors had predicted, before my dad even called me, that she might not make it overnight. Defiant until the end, Joan surprised them with an extra week.

Joan died overnight in hospital at the start of the weekend, and the news was a relief to me. Like I said, Joan was better than that hospital. Before, I never had any feelings about the afterlife, but now I am completely sure that she is once again the laughing, smiling, well-groomed, anecdote-sharing, perfect-English-speaking, strong woman who I knew. I have never been surer that somewhere else, someone is getting hell for saying “me and him” rather than “him and I.” And they don’t know it yet, but they are bloody fortunate for it.

I could write forever but I shan’t.
With my love as always Joan. See you later.


(I know it's not very trendy to like James Blunt's music, but something about this song makes a lot of sense to me right now.)

Frank Turner wrote this song after his grandmother died. Whenever I have listened to it before, it makes me feel closer to my other late grandma. It makes the whole thing feel a little less sad.