We love you and miss you terribly

These past few days have been bittersweet.

On the upside, Brent and I got to spend a whole lot of unexpected, quality time with our families.

But that time came at a terrible downside. Brent's grandma, Ruth Beck, passed away on Wednesday. She was just a few days shy of her 89th birthday.

I don't remember my grandfathers. One died before I was born and the other passed away when I was 2 years old.

I was must closer to my grandmothers - one who passed away in 1997 and the other who died four years ago. But since I've been with Brent, I've always called his grandmother "grandma" because that's what she was to me. She was the closest thing I had to a grandmother and now she's gone too.

A million thoughts ran through my head when Brent's dad called me with the bad news. One was that she was going to miss our wedding - which she said she wanted to live to see even before Brent proposed. Even though we weren't related, I knew she thought of me as one of her own grandchildren - especially when I saw that she cut out a photo of me that was in The Blade newspaper announcing that I was a new staff member there, framed it, and put it on an end table near actual photos of her actual grandchildren.

Another thought was that Brent was going to be devastated. He was really close to his grandmother, and the fact that he had to find out the bad news while he was at work - and had to finish out the day before we left for home - just destroyed me.

A third was that I would never get to hear her laugh again. Or hear her talk about a topic that excited her so much - like the Cleveland Indians, Browns, or the Cavaliers - that her words jumbled together because she was talking so fast.

She's the one who introduced me to The Carousel dinner theatre - something I looked forward to often when Brent and I would visit her in Wadsworth, Ohio.

And of course I always looked forward to playing cards with her, which was her second favorite thing to do with company - after watching sports on TV, of course. No matter how late it was, she was always up for some O.H. ("Oh Hell") or the card game golf.

Because she lived in Wadsworth, which is about two hours away from Toledo, whenever we would visit her, we would inevitably spend a night or two in one of the three spare upstairs bedrooms in the house she's lived in for more than 60 years - which has plenty of memories on its own. When the house was full, Brent and I would squeeze onto the daybed in the green room and elbow each other all night trying to find more room. And it was much smaller when his oldest niece, Katelyn, who's 2, would cuddle in there with us.

When we were lucky, we got the blue room or, even better, the yellow room, which used to be his grandmothers before she decided it would be easier to sleep downstairs in a bedroom that she had built on the ground floor. On the plus side, that room came with a few dressers, a chair, and a queen-sized bed.

On the minus side, that room was involved in the famous bat incident of 2007 in which I had to run in and snatch Katelyn from her crib because of the bat that had gotten inside the room and figure out a way to get it out. For the record, spraying it with Pledge doesn't make it want to rush to fresh air. It just makes it more irritated and covered with Pledge, which made me, armed with a broom and an empty trash can, and Brent's dad, wielding the Pledge, figure out Plan B to get it out of the house (trap it in the trash can and let it go out the window).

So even though her funeral was just as painful as my own grandmothers' funerals because I just kept replaying all the memories in my head, I'm so glad that Brent and I were able to fly home to be there with his family. Her funeral was short, but beautiful with an amazing eulogy by Brent's cousin, Garet, who was also very close to her. She was buried next to her late husband with photos of her great-grandchildren (Brent's nieces), playing cards, and sports memorabilia.

Afterward, we laughed and told stories about her at a luncheon at one of her favorite restaurants in Wadsworth, The Galaxy.

The next few days were spent with Brent's family and mine, which was thoroughly enjoyable, even though they were punctuated with tears.

I'll miss you grandma.