Today is the 6 year anniversary of my grandmother's death. She was a wonderful woman, and she's well known to doctors because of her amazing will to live.
Janice E. Brantley, my memey, was diagnosed with emphysema when I was just a baby. For 11 years, she fought the disease that she knew would one day take her life. She didn't let it get her down. She had the most amazing personality of any one person I've ever known. To agitate my grandfather, she would wear neon tie-dye shirts, a neon colored pair of shirts, a Day-Glo pink or green hat, her fanny pack, and her black sneakers. But this was just her own personal style. She loved anything loud and eye catching, but also loved more muted beauty found in nature. She absolutely adored owls, hummingbirds, and sunflowers. She had a vast collection of owls, most of which still stand in my grandfather's house. She would cross-stitch and knit things and when she was still able, sew.
She was a regular patient at Duke University Hospital in Raleigh, NC, and over the years the doctors formed a wonderful friendship with her. You couldn't not like her. Over the years, she endured many different treatments and surgeries, including a double lung transplant. She is in medical record books as the only person to ever survive one. Unfortunately the medicines that she had been taking to keep her body from rejecting the new organs slowly began eating away at her old ones. She was in the hospital in late September/early October in 1998 and lapsed into a coma. She was awake once, which happened to be while we were there and I got to speak to her one last time. Once she slipped back into the coma, she never came to. She was comatose through her 53rd birthday, and died one day shy of two weeks later.
It was a great shock and a horrible loss. I loved this woman more than life and all of a sudden she was gone. No more watching soaps with Memey, or her stockings for us at Christmas. No more Memey's Spaghetti. No more Memey. My 12 year old mind couldn't grasp what had happened to the fullest extent until Christmas rolled around. Why did she have to die? I loved her so much. I got angry at God; I bargained with him; I begged him. We laid her to rest on December 12th, 1998. I never realized how greatly she was loved by everyone she came in contact with; Even her doctors, the big guys up at Duke, took off of work to show up to pay their respects. Family I had never seen showed up. I looked all around me and realized that we were all thinking the same thing. "If only I could talk to her one more time".
I still think that. Today as I sit here writing this to you, I think of that and I bawl. Please, if there's someone you love that you haven't talked to in a while, just pick up the phone and call them. Go over and see them. We're not promised love; It's a gift. And we're certainly not promised a tomorrow. It,too, is a gift that can disappear as quickly as a flash of loving brown eyes and a Day-Glo pink hat.
I love you, all of you. Just in case I don't get a tomorrow, I wanted you all to know that.
-Arielle You can join Unsolved Mysteries and post your own mysteries or
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