Thoughtful

Today in the mail I received a bubble-pack from Potterchick.
She had called and asked for my zip code, so I knew something was coming.
I asked what and she said, "It's for you. You'll know what it is."

I opened the bubble pack and there was a card and an envelope from her bank.
I opened the envelope first, because I'm really five years old at heart.

Inside was a dried, pressed red rose.
I stood there and looked at it, mystified for a second and then it hit me.
And I welled up with tears, and felt such gratitude for her, for her thoughfulness, and for the fact that she knew I would want this, that she pressed it and found it again and sent it to me.

My beloved grandfather died December 7th.
At the funeral in Ohio, Potterchick came immediately and stayed with me the whole time. She drove in the funeral procession and listened to me alternately cry my eyes out and bitch at my loser cousins.

She took care of me when I drank two bourbons and a huge shot of Jamieson's on an empty stomach. She drove me all over town. She let me smoke a hundred cigarettes and dash away from her whenever I saw someone I wanted to say something to.

She deflected my increasingly strange aunt from talking to me too much.

She was sympathetic when my stomach went apeshit and sent me to the restroom every 13.4 miliseconds for four days. (What on earth was that? Stress?)

She was, in short, my absolute rock the whole time. She was the one person who I consistently looked for when I felt sad, the one I knew was there for me, and would let me cry without feeling like a huge baby. She let me hug her in her gorgeous suits.

At the cemetary, each family member stepped up and took a single red rose from the arrangement on my grandfather's casket. When we got to the wake, I set the rose on her car seat so I wouldn't mush it up when we were inside. After the bourbons and the whiskey, I didn't recall what happened to that rose.

My mother and sister-in-law and my brother kept their roses and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. I remember feeling like a jerk because I'd gotten too drunk and couldn't find mine. (I also felt slightly reminiscent, because getting drunk and not being able to find things isn't exactly new for me. Where's my car? Dude?)

I just pressed the rose into a beloved picture of my grandfather and I.

Thank you so much for your extreme thoughtfulness. It is appreciated beyond anything I can ever say to you.

Recent events have overcome the grief over the loss of my grandpa. But the loss of him is a palpable one. You would have to had known him to know what he meant to me, and to everyone that ever met him. You would have to know my family and I very closely to know that he will be remembered and missed frequently, all the days of our lives.

It is just every so often that someone comes into your life and makes it better just by the fact of them. My grandfather was one such person, and I had the priviledge to have him for 32 years.

Potterchick, you are another one.

Love you.