On This Specific Loss

Death has not been a stranger in the course of my life, but it has been a rather gentle and distant visitor. By and large, relatives and friends have been taken after full and well-lived lives and some after extended illnesses that allowed for farewells. It has spared those most immediate to me (though it flirted heavily a few times). As I grow older, I have always understood that this would change, that death's visits would draw ever closer through the network of souls I have learned from, leaned on, grown with, depended on, cared for, and generally built my personal community and network around. This summer, death came for a significant part of my foundation as a creative. I have shed tears, supported family through their immediate grief and the business of a formal farewell, but I have known I needed my own personal reckoning with this loss, separate from the immediacy of the direct aftermath.

And it is time, on this last day of 2025, to take this pain I have set aside and release it.

My grandmother, Eleanor Millsaps Hazell, passed away in June after a massive stroke. She was a handful of weeks shy of her ninety-third birthday. She had only recently moved into an assisted living facility and by all accounts was thriving. A quirk of timing had me only just finding out about the move about a week before she passed. I knew it was in the plans for 2025, I just hadn't realized it had happened yet. My birthday was also not long before she passed, so we had exchanged some texts. I got her new address and sent off a special card as a belated "best wishes on the new place" kind of thing. I dropped it off in the mail, but it arrived after her stroke. I found it unopened on her bed with her other mail items placed there in the hopes of recovery. It's been with me since, still unopened until now as I work on parsing this loss.

Her official obituary is here, along with a tribute slideshow that my father and his siblings worked hard to collate for the funeral home. In an extra tidbit of our family's journey, the slides feature my wedding very heavily. My uncle was our photographer and had all the original photos. The siblings wanted to include as many photos of my grandmother with all of her family members as they possibly could, and my wedding had that in abundance.

Just over a year before my grandmother's stroke, I had driven cross-country to deliver a specific painting to my brother after his house had completed repairs (oh, that tale definitely needs its own post). My grandmother in western North Carolina was right on the way to and from my brother's place in the DC area. I spent some time with her on the way out, picked up my son as part of a spring break trip in DC, and then we both enjoyed a visit with my grandmother on the return trip. I knew when I was planning the trip that it was quite possibly the last visit I'd have with her, certainly moreso for my son for whom schedules are not as flexible. We made the most of the time, although I foolishly forgot to take any pictures.

Despite having been born in Raleigh, I have nearly always lived a significant distance from my grandmother, sometimes as far as an ocean away. Growing up before the age of cell phones, we didn't have frequent contact either. However, she's always had an impact. Apparently, it was my grandmother's idea to play Pacheblel's Cannon in D for me when I was an infant refusing to settle and go back to sleep. It's been a fave ever since. My grandmother taught piano and played the organ in her churches of choice over the years. I tried taking up the piano myself in junior high and enjoyed it but never could quite get into it beyond some basic instruction, though I did teach myself a version of Cannon that I played (at an extremely nervous ridiculously fast pace to just get it over) at the lone recital I attended.

I still have the keyboard we got for me for those lessons waaaaaay back in 1990-something. It has traveled with me ever since, even if it has been relegated to being disassembled and in storage that whole time. We did a thorough cleanse of the garage and storage areas in November, which revealed the sorry state of the keyboard. I cleaned it up slightly and tucked it back into storage, but this time right up at the front so I can properly clean it and set it up in the near future. My fingers are itching to play some notes again.

Aside from her talent at the piano and organ, Eleanor also worked in water color and other painting and visual art techniques, and she was excellent at crochet and knitting until it got to be too painful for her arthritic hands. We've had at least one of her watercolors floating around the house for as long as I can remember. One of my aunts sent along a watercolor bookmark my grandmother made in 1989 that she found and wanted to share with me. It's the picture for this post.

She was one of my first readers for my first novel twenty-some-odd years ago, and I'm pretty sure she was the first person to tell me that "someone, somewhere needs your writing, so keep at it." It's a sentiment I have heard often since then in various writing communities, but she was the first to share it with me. When I started getting serious about art, she said my work reminded her of Gustav Klimt. As part of that cross-country trip to my brother, I had brought a bunch of my own art as I knew he was rebuilding his home from scratch and needed some decoration. After my brother took what he wanted, my grandmother grabbed some pieces for herself on my return visit.

One of those pieces she brought with her to her assisted living facility. They encouraged residents to decorate their doors in whatever fashion they wanted, and my grandmother wanted my painting hung on her door. And that led to my final exchange with her:

When she sent me the above, my belated "happy new home" card was in transit to her. Today, I opened it so I could remember exactly what I wanted to share with her. These were my last words to her that she never read:

I think of you often as I work on my art and submit my short stories. Your creative energy & encouragement are foundational to this journey of mine. I love you even more for them.

I may not believe in God in the same way I did growing up, but I have always maintained a belief in the power of connectivity and a universal spirit or energy beyond our understanding. I don't doubt my grandmother received these words somehow, but I do wish she had been able to read and comprehend them directly and explicitly while holding my card.

Throughout the ordeal of traveling to her bedside in hospice, gathering with family while we kept her as comfortable as possible as her body slowly wound down, helping out with shopping and meal prep and airport pickups and remembrance prep, through all of the chaos and tears and shared memories and grief of the immediate business of her passing, I found myself extremely grateful and fortunate that we had such a recent exchange and it had been just as generous and celebratory of my creative self as I always knew my grandmother to be.

Her ashes are interred in a lovely outdoor mausoleum by her church. I'll be able to visit that space in the future as needed, and remember her spirit all throughout the mountains of western North Carolina getting to and from that beloved church of hers. And I'll feel her encouragement with every painting, every short story submission, every creative endeavor I make.

Now. More tears have been shed. This bundle of remembrance and grief have had their due, released into the waning hours of 2025. There are more memories to cherish and share, more moments that will resonate, sometimes unexpectedly. There will always be something bittersweet in looking at this bookmark, or remembering our last text exchange, or reading this last card. But I'll carry that unrelenting encouragement (paired with her good Southern grace and no-nonsense attitude) with me into 2026 and beyond.