The Best of Grampy Bear

Posted by Beth: Many of you may already know that we lost our Grampy Bear last week. He passed away on Friday, Febraury 8 after a 16-month fight with brain cancer. Throughout our own sadness, Jamie and I have been most worried about telling Katie, but on Friday when we shared the news with her we were stunned by what happened. As I began to get the words out, Jamie and I both started to cry. When I told her that Grampy had died, she grabed my shoulders and said "Mom, it's okay. We will be okay." She then gave me a hug and gave Jamie a hug. And we then fielded a lot of questions about why.

From there we also had to break the news that we were leaving to go to Canada . . . and that she was not. We were very fortunate that Jamie's mum and his Aunt Suzie were able to come down and stay with the girls. They were able to have a terrific visit and keep to their routines and it helped us tremendously.

So first, a huge thank you to Janet and Suzie. Also, thank you to Ricia for jumping in with a kind offer to help and being the willing airport chauffeur. And thank you to the ND girls for the thoughtful idea to send prepared meals our way and to everyone else for the cards, flowers, calls and kind words during this time.

Rather than posting this week's photos, we would like to share the best of Grampy Bear. We will miss him terribly and are sad that the girls won't have more time with him, but are thankful for the time that we did have. We will also treasure these images and our memories.

We will certainly have many stories to share with the girls about their grandfather, although he was a pretty wild guy, so some of them might have to wait until they are a little older! You can read more about him on his blog: http://barryl.blogspot.com/