This is a difficult post to write. I'm not sure what to say that can even vaguely do it justice, but I don’t want to say nothing either.

Last weekend when we were in Hobart to celebrate Mum's birthday with Emma, we took the opportunity to visit Gran (which we normally did when we were in Hobart). Gran is my great-grandmother (my Dad's Father's Mother).

On Sunday (when we were there) we were especially pleased to see Gran active and full of life again. Over the last few years she has gone up and down, and often hasn’t had the energy to do much at all. But on Sunday she'd been going visiting around the nursing home, and was generally in the best spirits we'd seen her in for years.

Even when she was exhausted during her 'good for nothing' stages (her words, not ours) over the last few years, she was still very active mentally. She kept track of the goings-on in the lives of all her family, as well as a large number of other people – staff from the nursing homes, friends, and families of both. And that's not a small number to keep track of either.

But on Friday, we heard that Gran had gone into hospital. As we were almost in Hobart for the Church Camp anyway (half an hour north), we all headed into Hobart to the Royal to visit her. She was pretty exhausted and in pain, but was still keen to find out if there were any developments in my house purchase since last weekend, and asked Chris (who had also been at camp) about his mechanics course.

It was a bit of a shock to see her like this after the last weekend when she'd been so well - but it was still Gran. She may have been completely exhausted and in pain, but nothing else had changed.

We left her to get some rest, and went back to the camp. A few hours later we got a phone call to say she'd passed away.

We were all pretty devastated. It wasn’t really unexpected - but that doesn’t do much to prepare you. Especially not when you've been so close to someone for so long.

Thanks to our friends, we managed to make it through the rest of the camp.

On Tuesday we all went back to Hobart for the funeral. Work was really good about it, and let me take the day off.

As upsetting as funerals are at the time, they do help you, and you feel better afterwards.

I didn’t really know what to write in this post. I didn’t want to trivialize it, and I knew I couldn’t really do it justice. In a lot of ways it would have been easier to ignore it completely on this blog, and talk about my latest ebay purchase instead or something. But I didn’t want to ignore it either. I blog about all sorts of pointless things sometimes, and to ignore something like this because it's too hard would just be wrong.

We'll miss you Gran!