My grandmother was born on July 12, 1933.
Today marks the anniversary of her passing.
When she died in 2022, I shared a few thoughts online because I didn’t know what else to do with my grief. Then life continued. The days became months, and somehow four years have passed. I never wrote about what those years leading up to her death actually looked like.
Today, I want to.
When people think about the COVID 19 pandemic, they often think about lockdowns, face masks, and uncertainty. I think about becoming both a new mother and a caregiver at the same time.
In February 2020, I gave birth to my son, Phoenix. Almost immediately afterward, the world shut down. Like so many families, ours had to adjust quickly. My husband worked in healthcare, which meant he still had to report to work every day. My mother was caring for my grandmother while trying to balance her own responsibilities, and she needed help.
So, with a newborn and while navigating postpartum recovery, I became one of my grandmother’s caregivers.
Every weekday began the same way. We woke up around six o’clock each morning, got Phoenix ready, packed everything a breastfeeding baby would need for the day, and drove forty minutes to my mother’s house. My husband would leave for work after dropping us off, and Phoenix and I would spend the day caring for my grandmother. When my husband finished work around eight in the evening, we would make the forty minute drive back home. Some nights we didn’t walk through our front door until after ten, only to wake up the next morning and do it all over again.
It was physically exhausting.
I was recovering from childbirth, breastfeeding around the clock, and helping care for an elderly woman during one of the most uncertain periods in recent history.
Looking back, I don’t think I fully appreciated how much I was carrying.
But I also remember the beauty.
One of my greatest gifts during that season was watching my son and my grandmother build a relationship with one another. There was something incredibly special about seeing four generations together under one roof. She adored him, and he was naturally drawn to her. He may never remember those moments, but I do.
Those memories have become priceless.
Beyond their relationship, I watched something else happen. My son spent his earliest years surrounded by his Jamaican family, hearing our accents, eating our food, and simply existing in the presence of the woman who helped shape generations before him. It wasn’t something I planned, but it became one of the greatest inheritances I could have given him.
In 2022, our family’s circumstances changed, and my grandmother was living with us. I became her full time caregiver.
Just two weeks after celebrating her eighty ninth birthday on July 12, everything changed.
On the morning of July 30, I made her breakfast like I always did.
Phoenix, now two years old, went into her room to say good morning, just as he did every day.
But something felt different.
She wasn’t herself.
I remember looking at her and immediately knowing something was wrong. There are moments when your instincts tell you what your heart isn’t ready to accept. I called my cousins, then called an ambulance.
By eight that morning, she had been admitted to the hospital.
When I arrived around nine, the doctors told us that her body was shutting down and she likely would not survive the next day.
Around eight o’clock that evening, I sat beside her hospital bed with my sleeping two year old in my lap.
She spoke a few quiet words.
Then she simply said she was tired.
She closed her eyes.
A nurse came into the room, checked her, and softly told us she was gone.
I remember holding my son a little tighter as I quietly cried, trying not to wake him. I stayed with my grandmother for another forty five minutes before the staff gently let me know it was time to leave.
Walking out of that hospital without her was one of the hardest things I have ever done.
Caregiving is rarely talked about honestly.
People often see the appointments, the medications, and the responsibilities. What they don’t always see are the early mornings, the emotional weight of watching someone decline, or the quiet privilege of caring for someone who once cared for everyone else.
It is exhausting.
It is heartbreaking.
It is also one of the deepest expressions of love.
Today, I don’t think first about the long drives, the sleepless nights, or how overwhelmed I sometimes felt.
I think about breakfast.
I think about Phoenix climbing into her room every morning.
I think about ordinary conversations that I didn’t know would become memories.
If I had the opportunity to do it all again, I would.
Not because it was easy, but because loving someone until the very end is a privilege that not everyone gets to experience.
Today, I remember my grandmother not only for the life she lived, but for the lessons she left behind. She reminded me that caregiving is often invisible work, that love is most often found in ordinary routines, and that some of the most meaningful moments in our lives happen long before we realize they are becoming memories.
My Grandmother and Phoenix, in 2020
