rest in peace, grandma

Apriiori will be taking at least today off, because my grandma passed away this morning and I have no intention of trying to write a blog post right after hearing the news.

I wrote a little about my memories of my grandma, though.

my grandma passed away today

she was really impressive—she was brilliant academically, one of the first in her family to go through college, and she used to be a cancer doctor in puerto rico! people weren’t very used to doctors being women back then but she was, as i understand it, much more experienced than anyone else they could put on the radiology equipment and such. when i was in elementary school, she volunteered as the school nurse once a week.

she used to live in this house with a big pool in the backyard when i was REALLY young, but for most of my childhood she had this house in what i think was some sort of HOA neighborhood specifically for the elderly. it had three floors, two of which i don’t think she could ever really use, but my siblings and cousins and i always loved to go play with the chess set upstairs or screw around in the basement when we were visiting. it also had a really cozy library room with two walls totally covered in books.

my grandma knew lots of card games.. she taught us hearts, and a card game i think she called “roulette” to which the most similar thing i can find online is the game wikipedia calls “golf”. it used a 4x2 grid of cards, and you could look only at the lower row of four (a restriction that doesn’t exist in golf as far as i can tell—possibly the name comes from the added element of chance this additional rule provides?) but my family’s favorite card game has always been oh hell! it’s a kind of obscure game that i generally assume no one has heard of. but when we went to the family reunion for my dad’s side of the family (i think for my grandma’s brother’s funeral), everyone there knew it, and they had a massive tournament. everyone was very mad when i played strategies that slightly increased my chance at winning at the cost of being expected to lose me tons of points.

later in life, my grandma moved to a (very nice) retirement facility a couple minutes drive from my parents’ house. when i was in maryland, i used to sometimes visit to help her run errands or once to help set up a sleep apnea device. she’d always tell me stories about her life while we were driving around—i wish i had gotten to hear more of them, i always really enjoyed it.

i can’t do justice to my grandma’s life in just a few paragraphs, but i figured i should say something about it. she’s survived by her four kids, me, my three siblings, and my four cousins (two families of two kids). i have one remaining grandparent on my mother’s side, if you count great grandparents.