Rest Well

Grandma died last night.

She wasn’t my Grandma, but she was the grandma to my neighborhood – you know the type. The old lady with kind eyes, a smile for every stranger. The one who’s lived in the neighborhood for so long that she knows the kids of the kids who used to play ball in the street, who could tell stories about before such-and-such opened, or when something closed. She was a gem of a human. In summers, she would sit in her back yard topless, sipping a beer, smoking a cigarette and soaking in the sun.

A lifelong smoker, it was discovered two weeks ago that her cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. The doctors gave her three months. Last Sunday, the prognosis changed to just a few days.

Over the course of the week, every single time I’ve returned home, there have been cars in her driveway. Her children, their spouses, her grandchildren. Folks to keep her company, to soak in her light, to sit with her in her final days. I’ve never seen such a solidarity in a family as what I’ve witnessed since Sunday.

Today, when I returned home from my two hour sweat, it unnerved me that she was no longer living. Not that she was dead, but that she wasn’t alive. Does that even make sense? Her illness ravaged her body and took from her the light that once shone brightly. It decimated her, reducing her to a shell, a shred of who and what she was, the roles she played and the life she led crumbling into nothing.

As I tried to unravel the ways in which her death will affect her family, I couldn’t help but see the comparison between her being extinguished and the ways in which anorexia diminishes the light in those who suffer from it.

Sure, we live. We go about the day, moving from task to chore, all the while with an incessant voice that encourages self-doubt, self-hatred and objectification. I realize, in Grandma’s death just how much I want to live, to be alive. I want to find that sort of light that she carried, the one that was able to touch so many lives in so many ways. I know that the only way this can happen is to continue with this process, to trust the system as my Coach tells me, and to tell the raging voice of bullshit to shut the fuck up.

So I’m taking a stand. I ate today and I ate well. Went over my 1200 because I want to move up, I want to lift heavy and train hard. And the only way I’m going to fuel my path, encourage my growth and actually be ALIVE is by nourishing my body.

I hope Grandma is off somewhere with sun and beer, enjoying the rays and being out of pain.