Live from LA... its Tiff's life! post 1 of 2

Hi Friends!!

You will forgive the long delay in posting, I hope! My last post was the day after my grandfather passed away, and it was hard to get back to posting for a little while after that.

We left Tahoe, with bittersweet feelings, on Saturday the 16th, and when we got back to Laughlin, Nevada (where we had originally met my grama and grampa and picked them up), I drove Grama back to Lake Havasu City in her and grampa's car. It was so sad for us to be driving back from Tahoe without grampa, and I felt it keenly, as where he would have been sitting in the van was instead a bunch of "stuff". Then grama and I had a good drive back to Havasu, but it was sad and hard for both of us.

I was really glad, however, that I was with her for a couple days at the trailer, as I think it would have been even harder for her to be there alone. As it was, I left on Monday and it was a hard week for all of us, especially her. But while I was there, we went through all their papers and boxes to look for important things like the car title, and other stuff. We found some really neat papers and family memories, and I was really pleased to be a part of the discovery. I learned a lot about grampa and grama and I shed a few happy and sad tears together.

I returned home and found that I wanted to do nothing - seriously, I was lethargic and tired. I have done a lot of grief counseling over the last few years, but even knowing what to expect, I was too lethargic to think about it! I took a lot of naps, and sat quietly a lot. One other thing I did, and I think it was a healing experience for me, was make a photo scrapbook of my grandparent's 60th anniversary celebrations (the first couple days of the tahoe trip) for my grandmother. My parents and I went up the following Saturday to Havasu, picked her up and we returned to Laughlin so she could go back again and get that experience over with. Afterward I gave her the album, which made all of us cry, and I was glad to have had the opportunity to spend time with those memories before giving it to her.

I was going to take some pics of the album.... but I forgot before I gave it to her! :(

OK, so then I started packing and making the final arrangements to get here to LA. That is what I will talk about in the next post.

In the meantime, here is the link to the online obituary of my grandfather. In the paper version there were two photos, but I don't have them digitally yet, so you'll have to be content with the pic in the online version, which is from when he was a soldier in world war II (master sergeant): http://www.legacy.com/wenworld/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=116228282