RIP Eunice Best, grandmother, mother and wife. We love you.
It was odd, really.
How fast the sickness set in.
She wondered how she could mourn someone she'd barely known. But she did.
In a second, her world stopped spinning, because one of the oldest, most valuable and most unbreakable pieces had shattered.
Her grandmother had been sick for so long.
Alzheimer's, it was called. She'd taken the worst kind; the depression, the dementia. She wasn't happy. She cried for her mother.
But she was a survivor, as her mother would say.
So how the hell had some shitty disease come and broken her?
Pneumonia, it was called. Aspiration pneumonia.
She'd been fine less than 48 hours ago.
Then, she tried to swallow her breakfast in the morning.
The food went down her lungs.
She stopped breathing.
She went very cold.
They resuscitated her. Stabilised her. They could hardly believe the old woman had somehow managed to get her dangerously low blood pressure up?
She'd gone to school that morning, to her shame, barely leaving a thought for the old woman who was on oxygen in the hospital. She had exams.
She was doing her last exam when the vice principal came in.
She knew what was going on the second she saw the kind woman's face.
She and her brother's had driven home, alternating between silence and giggles.
They didn't know what to say.
How, she wondered, was her grandfather going to go on? He'd stayed so strong through years of his own wife slowly forgetting him and slipping away. Because of the stupid Alzheimer's.
She was the centre of his world.
Every day, every single day, he went to visit her and didn't leave for hours. The Christmas morning she woke up covered in blood and ready to be rushed to the hospital, the carers could hardly look at her.
He told her she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen and he loved her.
It was funny. The girl had never really focused on her granny in her reality, not really ever, but now the world had stopped.
Life goes on, she realized blackly, seeing the emails and tweets and people coming out of school.
Today, a life had slipped away, due to some shitty fucking chest infection, and the world hadn't stopped. It should have really, but it did not.
In some small part of her heart and mind, she knew it was a good thing, in a way. Her grandmother was a Christian and was in Heaven now, free of any pain, suffering or hurt of any kind.
But they would mourn. She didn't really know how the story would unfold, just that it would. She had God and she had beautiful friends and amazing family, but she didn't have her granny. She'd seen the Alzheimer's, seen it break her mother's heart, but she'd been too young for the world to stop.
But it had stopped now.
I'm so sorry, they'll say. Deepest regrets... apologies... sorry for your loss...
Words. Empty words, recited over and over everywhere.
Shut up! She wanted to scream.
Just shut up a second.
And think
Of the families
Of the people
Every year
Every month
Every. day.
Every hour, minute and second
Who slip away
And leave broken hearts behind.