“What Broke Your Heart Completely?” 30 Stories (6/30)

My Grandmother raised me. My dad died of a sudden heart attack when I was 8. My mom never got over it, started drinking, so my grandmother, who was 74 at the time, took over for caring for me and my little brother.

She broke her hip when she was in her late nineties, and she had to be put in a nursing home. I would go visit her, by then she had started living in the past. She knew me, but she thought I was still in school and would ask why my brother wasn’t home, what we wanted for supper, things like that.

One day I went to see her, and didn’t recognize me or know who I was, and didn’t speak. That was the most heartbreaking, gut wrenching day of my life. That broke me. Completely. I went to my car and cried like a baby for a long time.

She died at the age of 103, but that was the day I lost her. I didn’t cry at her funeral.