The Olson's

So last night was interesting...Jeff and I went over to my grandma's house to suprise her for her birthday, and we were the ones who ended up getting the surprise. My grandmother dropped the bomb on us that she is dating someone. It was so weird and it wasn't like we sat down and had a heart to heart about it, she just dropped it in during casual conversation, like she was telling me what she had for dinner or something. My 69 year old grandma has a boyfriend.

Let me give you the background on why that is so odd...my grandfather, who was like a father to me, since my own father left before I was born, died four years ago in January....well let me be more exact...he killed himself four years ago. He got up around 5:30 in the morning, wrote his suicide note and left it on the kitchen table along with his glasses, wristwatch, wallet (minus drivers license, you know, so they could identify the body), and his fish and game raffel tickets that he had sold, and drove down to the parking lot by the Big Blue River. He parked his truck where people could see it from the highway because he worked at Dick Edwards on Highway 24 (so that way someone going to work would recognize his truck and come check it out), propped his riffel up against the front bumper, positioned the gun exactly where he had researched would be fatel, and pulled the trigger. The sad thing is that the first shot didn't do the job, so he lined back up and did the whole thing over again. That is what I woke up to January 16, 2004. This also happened to be the day after my brother's 18th birthday, and my grandpa had spent over an hour talking to my brother on the phone the night before. None of us understood why he did this, but when we were going through his office, we found a rough draft of his suicide note in his desk. Apparently after talking to the insurance companies (who he had called for info on whether his life insurance had a suicide clause), he had been researching all of this for six months prior to actually doing it. Needless to say it was a rough time.

I was living with my grandparents at the time, and afterwards my grandma and I became very very close. We had always been close, but we really leaned on each other in the months following. I tell her everything, and vice versa. I guess what is bothering me about her dating is not that she is actually dating someone, but that she chose to tell everyone else in our family before telling me. She saved me for last, and I had to hear about it from other people instead of actually from her. I feel hurt. I had always put a lot of stock in how open and honest with each other we are, but it feels like she didn't want to tell me. I know she had her reasons, and I respect that. I just wish that she felt like I would have respected her decisions instead of judging her. My heart is hurt, and I feel like not only is my family changing, she doesn't rely on me, or need me to talk to anymore. Maybe I am being selfish, but I don't think honesty is that much to ask for.