Hello All. So glad you could come back for the second part of this blog. When I set out to write this blog last week, I had no intentions of it being a multi-part blog. Writing that blog was so completely draining, I knew I couldn’t finish so I just brought us up to this millennia. If you haven’t read the first part, please search for it, or if you are a Facebook follower, it can be found easily on my website JessicaCalabriaAuthor.com. Go ahead, I will wait. At the beginning of 2000, my great grandmother, a woman who went by Meenie Maw, succumbed to dementia. It was a brutal process. My tough as nails great grandmother who was the sweetest and most gentle person I ever knew, lived until her late 80’s. In her life, she was a strong woman and a pioneer. Hazel was married to a tenant farmer and they had two daughters, Luci and Arlene. When the farmer who owned the land sold, they all moved to Baltimore, where I am originally from. My great-grandmother worked at 3 different waitress jobs, with the time between used to cook her two children and husband meals. My great grandfather was a painter. When the weather wasn’t right for painting, he would just stay home. Meenie Maw was much too strong a woman to put up with this buffoonery and left him. I told you she was a pioneer. Hazel eventually met Harry, a band leader, who renamed his band “The Hazelnuts.” He died almost twenty five years before her, and he was still one of her favorite things to not only talk about, but brag about how wonderful he was. Now here is a little something different to throw on to the grief train. In 2004, I was divorced. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that grieving is not a normal part of divorce. My ex-husband and I were married young, he was 19, I was 18, and we managed to stay together for almost 13 years. The reason for the breakup isn’t important, except for the aspect of our youth. When we divorced, I was 31, had spent all of my adult life in service to his military career, and had sacrificed my own goals as it is hard to have your own goals as an Army wife. I volunteered a lot and did work wherever we were, but I sacrificed myself for the marriage and then was left with nothing. No more military benefits, but the hardest to me was the loss of the whole college experience. I missed my twenties as a free woman, but that was just delayed to my 30’s. The loss of going to college and living on campus was something I dreamed of as a child for as long as I could remember, and now, that was never going to happen. Luckily, I had a work around for this also. I am just about to finish my degree and in the application process of a MFA program where I will live for 2 weeks a year at an intense session for writers. From this grief, I was able to rise like the mighty phoenix. Shortly after I moved back home, I lost the first of the generation of my mother when her only brother died. My Uncle Rick was not only hard as nails, he was a big softie also. Rick was a Marine and then became a firefighter until he fell through a roof and hurt his back in the line of duty. He was the only boy and quite a bit older than my mother, close to ten years older, but my mother said when they would bump into each other when out and about with friends, Rick would always ask if the needed anything like money. He had three daughters whom he adored and who loved him completely. Then in 2013, the world of my family was rocked in a way we couldn’t have imagined. Longevity runs in my family. My Aunt Sharon went into surgery to have a simple gallbladder removal surgery. I had mine removed at 23 in 1997 and my mother had hers removed when she was just barely 16. My grandmother had what was called, at least in the 70’s, a “porcelain gallbladder.” She was told that her gallbladder was nonfunctional and was just a hard mass. I think my Aunt Sharon was hoping for the same thing. However, when they started the surgery, it was discovered that she had terminal bile duct cancer. Man, let me say this now. Fuck cancer. For the people in the cheap seats FUCK CANCER!!!! I am so sick of losing so many good people to this. As has the world. So, one last time, shouting from the mountain tops FUCK CANCER!!!! We lost Aunt Sharon on November 5, 2014, which is also my brother’s birthday. Seven years later I lost my cat Millie to mammary cancer on November 5 also. In 2014, my aunt had lost her long term boyfriend David, suddenly to a stroke or heart attack. Throughout the services, she was heard to have been muttering “This wasn’t supposed to be how this happened.” Even with her death so imminent, the grief was still so real to her. She lost her companion of almost 20 years. In 2017, my dad was hospitalized. He called me and my brother to visit him on a Wednesday night at the local hospital. He was a man nearing 69 in less than 2 months, so trips to the hospital did happen occasionally. He had lost his second wife, Caroline, a year and a half earlier, and he spent his days at the cemetery talking to her grave. My dad had worked as a steelworker when I was growing up and later on as a truck driver. He loved driving and it was without a doubt a great fit for him. So when he summoned us, didn’t think too much of it. He told us that he had terminal lung cancer. All together now FUCK CANCER!!!! He said he was going to start chemo the next day, but he didn’t know how long he had. My father was in a lot of pain but do to his 25+ years of being clean and sober, would not take anything stronger than a Tylenol. My brother, his wife, 2 kids, me, and my mother were leaving for Disney World in a couple of weeks so my brother and I started talking to make arrangements to see him as much as we could with whatever time we had left. Two days later, on Friday, just as I pulled into my parking spot at work, I got a call from my brother. He told me that a nurse had called him and let him know that my father was not scheduled to get chemo, my father had misunderstood him. Chemo would have immediately killed him. The nurse did tell my brother that my father had been moved to hospice and if we wanted to see him, we needed to come that day. I immediately called my boss, stated I wouldn’t be in, and headed over to the hospice. The nurse informed me that she was finally able to convince him to take some morphine. She then explained that morphine suppresses that pulmonary system. There were people in his room when I arrived, and they were from his AA group. I sat next to him and held his hand. My brother arrived shortly after, as did my mother. They may have been divorced for over 25 years but he was her first and only love. Although she didn’t feel anything for him romantically in many years, once you have built something like a life together, they will always be in your heart.  The only words he uttered while I was there was when his brother’s friend gave him a hug and told him “I love you,” and he was barely able to say it back. For a while, it hurt me that he said it only once and to her, but I now see that he was saying it probably to his wife Caroline or to myself. He passed a few minutes after 3 that day with myself holding one hand and my brother holding the other. We sat and just talked and cried for about 15 minutes. The youngest of 8 kids, he had lost two older brothers before I was born. He lost one in a war before he was born, and the other was murdered in the early 70’s. Of the remaining six, he was the first to go, and the first to go after his mother had passed. His funeral was small and his pallbearer’s were his friends from AA. He now lays above his beloved Caroline in the cemetery that he used to just visit daily. Well, dear reader, this appears it is going to be a minimum of a three part blog, as the worst is about to be revealed. Come back next week for the third part of Grief is a *Explicit Language Follows. Thank you dear reader, for taking the time to read.