Ten.

I am a week or two late writing about this depending on how you're counting it, but I thought I was doing okay. I was bracing myself for waves of memories, but it didn't happen. I remembered, but I was shocked by how little I felt. To be honest, the last two weeks have been pretty busy with some Major School Stuff followed by a quick weekend trip to Wisconsin. It didn't leave much time for feeling anything. Well, except for the guilt that I wasn't feeling much about this 10 year anniversary. Who wants to write or read about that stuff?!

But that's the thing about feelings: the presence or absence of them does not change the facts. I still miss my grandparents. 

One of the things that continues to surprise me is how you can lose someone but you never stop missing them. The difference is in the timing. At first it's every minute of every day but over time you develop a new normal. You ride a roller coaster where you're fine for a spell and all seems well, but around the next turn there's a sudden and steep drop into a deep well of sadness. You ache over something that made this person wonderful or special to you, and you miss them. 

I remember some of the strangest little things--  how Grandpa laughed or the way Grandma called for one of us. Grandpa like Frosted Flakes when he got up in the middle of the night, and Grandma liked to read before she went to bed each night. How Grandpa was hesitant to let us mow the lawn but let us talk him into it. How patient Grandma was when we broke the lawn mower and then worked to fix it so Grandpa wouldn't regret letting us mow. The way they hardly batted an eye when a baseball broke their front window during a Sunday afternoon game. 

I still have times when I miss them all over again, and I almost feel foolish because people expect you to be "over" something that happened so long ago. But let's be honest here: you don't stop missing someone because enough time has passes. Life doesn't stop happening. Sometimes the hardest thing is that it keeps going when you want to say, "Wait! Something's not right here!" You want to share the joys and sorrows with someone that isn't there to share it with you. A part of you will always ache over that. It's hard to make sense of it when you have those aches. 

The ache came on Friday while I was at Walmart. I was buying a 50th anniversary card for my Nana and Papa and found myself tearing up. I was thankful and excited to celebrate this milestone with them, but I was also aching that we wouldn't get to celebrate that same milestone with Grandma and Grandpa. But oh, what a legacy of love they have left to us. What an example that I admire and cherish as I learn more about my own marriage each and every day. I am so, so blessed to have these two amazing couples to look up to. 

I'll continue to miss them, but I face each of these waves of sadness with the knowledge that we'll see each other again when we are in heaven together. 

This song is one that's near and dear to me because my cousin Jess and I would text each other about how much it put our feelings into words for us. It gets me through those aches.