Grandma (Jackie)
Grandma (Jackie)
Mya
I was 6 years old and in my grandparents kitchen with my grandma. At home, my older sisters would always get my parents attention. My grandparents lived a mile from us, so I would always go over to their house by myself every day after elementary school.
Popcorn was one of my favorite snacks so we would eat it all the time. Whenever we would make popcorn together she would have this “popcorn song”.
We would sing it while the popcorn was popping and we would hop up and down in circles and say: pop pop pop poppity pop pop pop and it was always really fun.
The popcorn would come out and we had this special popcorn bowl that we would put the popcorn in and eat together.
I am pretty sure that at that time, she had cancer and was doing chemo. From what they told me, I knew that she went to the doctor a lot and would get really tired. This memory holds a lot of significance to me because she was one of my favorite people growing up. Because she passed away not long after, I do not have many memories with her. If I were to lose this memory, I have others, such as being there when she passed away. When she was in hospice, they told me she was sick when I was 8 or 9. I did not know what it meant to have cancer. They said she was sick and I thought having cancer was contagious, like having the cold (which was really the only type of sickness I knew about).
I have this really awful memory: Whenever she would give me a kiss on the cheek or forehead, I would wipe her kiss away. I remember seeing her look very hurt when I did that. I just had thought she was passing germs--that I could get sick from her kiss. If I lost that good memory and all I had left was remembering her hurt face from me wiping away her kiss, that would really hit me hard.
She was really kind and caring and loved to garden! She was a master gardener who always had flowers, and we would plant them together.
She would say: You should take care of flowers like you would take care of others.
The summer she died, we planted these butterfly bushes in her garden, but they never attracted any butterflies. However, the day she died, there were all of these yellow monarch butterflies that just showed up all over.