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  2021-04-21

  Grieving a non-covid death

  My grandfather on my dad’s side passed in April 2021. It’s coming close to a year mark at my time of writing this. I think that being in a time surrounded by so much death and loss that we have forgotten about those who have died during this time unrelated to Covid. He had suffered kidney failure in late 2013/early 2014, that part of my life is blurry in memory so I don’t recall exactly, but he had been on dialysis ever since. It’s been hard to talk about his passing, everyone assumes that death in the last two years always has to do with Covid. Death is never easy to talk about, but it is inevitable for every living creature. My grandfather was old and had been sick for a long time, he lived a long and happy life. I don’t mean that in some cheesy way, he truly did. I carry a tremendous amount of guilt surrounding his death. Due to Covid restrictions, I didn’t get to see him for a year leading up to the week that I spent with him while he was in the hospital, then hospice. I still think about him all the time and the last days that I got to spend with him. I don't think I'll ever get to have that closure I want due to this. It’s almost as if we had expected death due to illness, accident, age, anything else, expected to stop. Yet, death of all causes never stops.