The Cemetery Penny

First off, thank you very much for all those who voted on the on the zipper pull question. This shows my dedication to the readers. Marti said that I should go with the black one. I kinda wanted to go with the silver one with the bigger end. But by a huge majority of 2, I went with the readers and put on the plain silver tab. Here is what is looks like.

Now onto the finds. I found 3 pennies and a 2 cent Euro (One penny has a special story, read more below). I haven't searched the exchange rates, but given the way the dollar has fallen, I'm sure that once I picked up that 2 cent Euro, I owed somebody money! You can see the Euro below.

Finally onto the most important part of this post, and why it has the title. Last week, my Grandmother, who is 97, fell in her apartment and wasn't doing that well. Long story short, I got the call on Friday afternoon that we had about 24-36 hours left. So I raced home to see my Grandma. As expected it was an emotional experience. She had been with a full-time caregiver and was under the care of Hospice. When I got there she was basically in a coma, and her breathing was labored. The caregiver was helping make her as comfortable as possible, but giving her morphine every hour or so. It was not a super fun experience, as she had periods of up to 45 seconds where she would not breathe, then later in the night she fluid began to build up in her lungs and she began to make some noise with every breath. The caregiver called it the death rattle. (Personally I think it's time to come up with a new term)

I stuck around until around 3 am, then went back to my Mom's house to get a few hours of sleep. At around 7:45 am, I got the call that we were getting very close, and I should come back if I wanted to. I did, and at 11:34 am, my Grandmother passed away with me holding her right hand & my mother holding her left. I'm not a religious person at all, but I have to say that this was a very spiritual experience. I had only seen one other dead body, and that was at a wake, and obviously, I had never been with someone when they died. It honestly wasn't that scary or weird. I felt a small twitch in her hand before she passed, and as weird as it sounds, I felt a lot of love in the room. Like I said before, it is hard to put in words, but it was a very spiritual experience.

On Sunday, my mother, aunt and a few cousins went out to the cemetery to get everything in order for the funeral on Monday. While they were finishing up paperwork, I went outside to get some air. I was just walking along a path, when I found this penny (pictured below) on the side of the road. While most of the change that I find just goes in with all my other change, this coin will be put in a special place.

Total since last post - $0.03
Total for the Race - $265.55