Gone too soon.

*p.s sorry in advance for weird formatting. I copied from a word doc into blogger and it is going crazy. ugh.* there should be gaps between the paragraphs, I don't know why they aren't showing up.* or else they are an I've written this note for nothing. double ugh.*

In approaching the one year anniversary of the death of my grampa Dick, I am newly moved by grief.

C.S. Lewis has been a comfort to me, as well a hymn/poem that I read by Wesley. I will post these words in the next post. I will also likely post on this topic again, around the one year anniversary, but don't worry friends. I hope I will not continue in my maudlin musings - and I have a great update on my CSLewis book re: the Psalms and nature!

Just now, though, I was thinking at how different the passing was of my grampa versus that of Michael Jackson.

My grampa “went missing” – in the sense that he had a heart attack, was picked up by the paramedics and taken to the Lk. Tahoe hospital, then airlifted to Reno – all while my family was returning from Reno to Tahoe. So when he didn’t show up at the assigned meeting place, he was missing. No one knew where he went. We called the sheriff and the police, but there are two sheriffs because there are two counties and we called the wrong one. We asked at the casino, but there had been a shift change, so they didn’t know about what had happened. We did eventually find him, the few of us that were there to look for him. MJ on the other hand, had the eyes of the world on him from the first moment. Though there was a lot of speculation about where his body was, there were like 15 helicopters and 300 people around his hospital.

When my grampa passed away suddenly, after the dr. telling us that he thought grampa might actually recover; we sat around together in the hotel room and had a glass of champagne in his honor, told stories about the things we would miss; and my brother read some words. It took about 3 hours, and there were 9 of us there. It was his only memorial service – because my grama said he would not have wanted a fuss. MJ had a 2 million dollar public memorial service with almost 20k people in attendance.

On the one year anniversary of his passing – August 14^th – I don’t expect many people to mark the passing of my grampa. Though loved by all who knew him, many of those people have gone Home and others simply won’t realize the significance of the day. But when MJ’s one year anniversary comes, it will be front page news.

I know that it’s the way of this world – MJ was an icon to billions of people – he was known world-wide, so I’m not bitter about the differences, but they could not be more distinct. And sometimes I wish more people knew how awesome my grampa was – that they knew about his history of service in WWII, his love of wordworking and crafts, the way he cajoled my grama into letting him have candy bars and bacon, the silly jokes and sentimental words.

I miss him as much today as I did 11 months ago. And I wonder when my grief will slip from pain to ache, from wound to scar. And I wonder how my grama can continue, knowing that her grief is infinitely greater than mine – and I am proud of her that she has.