Condolences, ~bunny. This must be so hard :(
As an aside, they wonder why the tourist industry collapsed here, but for the cost of a one-way flight to the island from the UK, I could've got a return flight to the other end of Europe.
Anyway, here I am, back in my childhood home, that happens to be the childhood home of my mother, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, their parents, and so on. I'd come back on short notice to help my mother, who is caring for my grandfather, who has just come out of hospital. With a poor relationship with my stepfather growing up, my grandfather was the male role model in my life. The person who went for me on rambling walks across the island and rambling conversations over a surreptitious pint. My love of chess, that's from him - if anything, that was a young me desperately wanting to be like him. The man that, for the first time in my life, told me I had permission to say no. Never did get the hang of that, mind, but I remember standing two feet from where I'm currently sat, frustrated to the point of years, when he looked at me and told me I could tell them no.
Now he can barely move and I'm a stranger to him. Grief for the living feels guilty but I'd found myself just weeping uncontrollably for an hour this afternoon.
I take parts of people, usually snippets from photographs, and hold those to my heart. What they've become now almost doesn't matter, because they touched me at crucial developing parts of my life and these core memories can't really fade. They made us feel safe, loved, and worth loving.
My grandma was a proud sweet woman with a hard wit, and a sharp tongue to match. She cooked the best meals I've ever had, and no one on this earth can come close to matching what she made. War survivor, refugee, early widow, she raised her kids into functioning adults and then raised their kids when they didn't have time (or desire, in some cases).
Her mind slipped towards the end, and then the corona crisis overloaded the NHS and she no longer could get her regular checkups. We looked after her ourselves, but that required changing her familiar setting, and that slipped her harder. Right before the end she was a mewling baby, cognitive and physically, and I had to clean her a few times myself like she was my child.
I choose not to remember her like that though. That's just a small bad episode in her life where she wasn't quite herself. When she was herself, she was a proud lioness deeply entrenched in the politics of her family and culture, and that's how I'll remember her.