Why can't someone wake me up from this nightmare?

         I haven’t found the courage to write.  Each time I want to write my thoughts down, I stopped myself or I found an excuse to shift my focus elsewhere.  This is one post that I feared that I’d have to write someday, and that day is today.  As we get older, and as each day renews, we know that our time on Earth is being shortened.  We don’t know how much time we’re promised so each day is a gamble.  Will we live for another day to tell our stories?  Will we live another day to see our loved ones?  How much time do we have left?  Nobody truly knows the answer to that question.  Not even a doctor to a terminally ill patient can tell you, exactly, how much time that patient has left.  Sometimes, there is a window or a timeframe if it’s any consolation for anyone.  “This patient has no more than 2 days”.  Unfortunately for our family, we didn’t know how much time we had left with Grandpa and Grandma, despite them being at the hospital with around the clock care by different teams of doctors and nurses.  Grandpa and Grandma were taken away by ambulance on Daddy’s birthday, January 17th.  Grandpa left us on January 21^st and Grandma left us on January 24^th.  It was the worst days of our lives.  The pain was unbearable at times.  I know a good cry sometimes help relief some pain but not this time around.  It has been a little over a month since their passing and I still hurt.  I still cry.  But that shouldn’t come as a surprise when you’re dealing with one of the greatest losses of your life.  That moment when you feel the lowest of the low.  Have I really hit rock bottom this time?

I’m still in denial.  I still can’t imagine my grandparents being gone.  A huge part of me thinks they’re just away, on a trip visiting family and relatives.  My heart misses them, my brain refuses to accept the fact that they’re gone.  Even when I had to look at them and stood there face to face with their caskets laying side by side at the mortuary.  And eventually, I saw their caskets that were already lowered into the ground, side by side.  3 weeks later, I still refuse to believe it.  How could they be gone?  That’s impossible!  I had just visited them 2 weeks before they were admitted to the hospital.  They were still alive and healthy.  They were just home, eating with us.  We had just celebrated Christmas and New Year’s Eve together as a family.  We were just getting ready to gear up for Lunar New Year, and for me, I was contemplating if I should juggle Valentine’s Day orders or not this year.  We were literally just together.  Now the world of science wants me to believe that they’re gone, forever.  That I’ll never get to talk to them again?  That I’ll never get to physically see them again?  That I’ll never hold my grandma’s hand or be able to give her another hug, ever again?  This can’t be real.  They weren’t supposed to die…at least not yet anyway.  They weren’t supposed to die because there are still so many things that I wanted to share with them.  Let it be food, successes, stories, mishaps, our future babies, our new home, my 40^th birthday this year…we still had so much to look forward to as a family.  This wasn’t supposed to happen, not now, not this year, and not like this.  Let this be a horrible nightmare and someone please wake me up.