Marvin Elliot Thomas

It’s been a long week and I feel as though I have let my avid readers down! I got a surprising number of emails from people that I didn’t even know knew this site existed. So thank you! Unfortunately, last week was probably one of the worst of my entire life. My dear Grandfather passed away and the shock left me completely devastated. I was fortunate to be holding his hand when he passed, which I will always be grateful for. I now know, without any hesitation, that he went peacefully. But watching someone you love so much pass on is not a fun thing to do. Whenever I close my eyes, I still see him taking his last breath and this is a memory that I don’t think I will ever be able to escape or to come to terms with for that matter. When I was a little girl, my Grandpa was so much fun. Whenever I came to visit, one of my favorite things was to go to coffee with him at the coffee shop. I can still see their only waitress in my head and she always gave me extra whip cream on my hot chocolate. On days that I would go, my Grandpa would get a table just for us instead of sitting with his friends and we would talk. After coffee, we would go to his auto shop, where he would always slip me the key to pop vending machine and I would sit on the spin chairs until my Grandma would come to get me. I think another part of this that is so extremely overwhelming is the fact that I won’t be able to add to these memories and that my daughter will never know how much my grandpa loved her. He was so excited the day she was born that he sat in the waiting room all day until he got to hold her. I have no doubt that he loved her as much as Chase and I do. He loved us grandkids dearly and spoiled us freely, yet he provided us with the same sense of responsibility that he had and taught us how to care about other people. When I was a young child, I asked my grandmother why Grandpa didn’t know my name because he always called me “Dollface,” which he called both Heidi and I to the very end. I know that he was looking forward to doing the same for his two great-grand daughters. Being called “Dollface” your entire life can set you up for some disappointment in relationships with teenage boys though ;). I remember once when Chase and I were going through a grey area of our relationship, I went to visit my grandpa. He told me that we had two options; one was “to go get a shotgun and track him down” or “drive down to the river and check the fence.” Luckily for my current day husband, we choose to go check the fence to make sure the horses couldn’t get out, which is one thing that used to infuriate my grandpa. My grandpa was someone who could always put me back together and make me feel whole again, no matter what my heart was hurting about. At his funeral, there were so many people there that wanted to pay tribute to a man who touched thier lives that I was overwhelmed to a certain degree. Of course, the Merrick Family found a way to ruin the experience, but I have no idea why I'm even suprised. I’m going to have to end this because it’s stressing me out too much. There are no words that would justify what he meant to me, so I'm going to stop trying.