Grandmother, Blessings on your Journey

HAWMC Day 2...but post is on hold for later today.
After staying up most of last night finishing up essays and poems constituting snippets of my MFA thesis and composing my final packet of the year...
But barely a half hour ago...she left the world.

Although she had "come back" many times before, I think we felt it coming. Which doesn't make it any better. Why had I been thinking so achingly and so often of my ties to Israel, of my desire to write about my family's move from Iraq to Israel in the upheavals of the establishment of the state? In my newly untethered state, why had I been entertaining seriously the idea of up-and-moving to Israel, for an extended period or even indefinitely?

What opportunities missed!
True, I have myriad close relatives in Israel, but my grandmother was the closest. Her love might have been mediated by insistent giving and scarce receptivity. She might have been averse to the words I love you and given to asking why your course of study was worth anything. She might have been quick to shout and escalate as soon as politics came into the living room, as it did at least daily. She might have been comical cursing and gesturing in Arabic at Arafat and Ahmadinejad on Al Jazeera in her living room.
But she loved.
I believe she gave me my culinary flair, together with my preference to serve the food and hide in the kitchen (she let me hide with her, but usually never let anyone in there with her). My mispronunciations of several words are her Iraqi accent. I can curse in Arabic thanks to her versus Arafat. As a child, I couldn't understand why there were two words for so many common things until I realized Arabic and Hebrew twined together in her tongue, from one word to the next.
I can't believe she's gone.
I've been writing poems about her for three years now. More to come.
My grandfather died 25 years ago, when I was tiny. I remember the phone ringing, picking it up, hearing my aunt's voice, having known even before I picked up the phone what the message would be, and trying to prepare my mum as I handed over the phone. That was an out-of-the-blue sudden death, whereas this one was sudden but expected. So how did I know, as a little kid? No matter, I remember starting to worry then, what would we do when my grandmother went too--where would we go when we came to Israel, what home away from home?
That time has now come.
Blessings, grandmother, on the next stage of your journey. Born Basra. Married, moved to Baghdad. Expulsion of the Jews, to Haifa, three kids. To one transit camp, four kids. To another transit camp. Finally, to Herzlia, to a small house with a macadamia nut tree nearby, and then to the apartment where she lived until today, first with husband and four children, then with husband, then alone, then with carer. Always thronged with daily visitors.