This past Sunday I went to see my grandma, my mother’s mother. She has had cancer for five-plus years now and recently my mother emailed the family letting us all know that grandma was starting to have trouble breathing and swallowing—signs that the end was getting nearer.

“Your other grandma took forever to go, too,” says Jasmine. My husband and I meet her and Clint at the Chili’s near the freeway when we’re finished visiting my grandparents. Jasmine’s mom and grandma died within a year of one another, the same year she and Clint lost their infant foster daughter back to the Los Angeles family court system. Jasmine’s life seems like one hit from a semi-truck after another. We toast our happy hour drinks—my margarita on the rocks, my husband’s blended, Clint’s beer in a tall plastic stein mug, Jasmine’s root beer in a bottle—to Clint’s recent skin cancer removal follow-up appointment revealing excellent margins. Some people just can’t catch a break. And others, well, our lives feel like a lifetime in line at the waterpark. You wait and wait, get excited, get bored, get excited again, get scared, and then it wasn’t really all that great after all.

When my mother’s mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, we said our first set of goodbyes. When that breast cancer metastasized to brain cancer in 2013, we said our second. At this point we’ve lost track—it’s reached her lymph nodes, lungs and bones. They recently found another kind of cancer on her scalp in a small mole.

“Why are they even checking for things still?” my husband, who’s in med school getting versed on hospital efficiencies, asks. They aren’t treating her for anything at this point. It’s purely for her comfort—or discomfort?—to know. We have a lot of discussions about the ethics of this in our household.

When my father’s mother died in December 2010, it had been a similar sort of battle. She was in a car accident coming back from an Alaskan cruise and broke both her legs, but never left her wheelchair. Then diabetes, dementia, and downhill from there. Again, with someone in that kind of shape you lose track of your last goodbyes. I’m thinking about all that, this week. How the last time I went to see my Nana at the hospital I lost it, had that thing happen where it hits you and you cover up your mouth and cry and cry and have to leave the room and find a bathroom, wet your face and pat it down with paper towels. Where you see it hit your parent and that sends out a second wave, another type of grieving grief that’s just as sharp and unexpected as the first. Or the worst kind: when you see your parent hold it in and be a good daughter, or an exceptional son. Holding their hand and smiling and telling them that yes it hurts and yes they’re dying and yes it’s scary but also everything’s okay. Will I be able to do that one day? I think, driving down from Sacramento to Livermore, the mid-sized suburb 80 minutes out where all my family has lived for years. Will I be able to do that today? When my parents die someday, will I be as good to them as I’ve seen them be to theirs? If my mother’s mom is really near the end today, how will I hold it in? Jasmine’s right—we’ve gotten used to things dragging out in this family, become skilled at postponing our ultimate emotions for the time the wolf actually arrives. I think about her mom being young, fifty-five or fifty-six or something. I think about none of it being right or fair. But when we arrive my grandma, the ’50s housewife that she is and will forever be, is in full jewelry, clothes and makeup, not ready to let go of this world just quite yet. The roar of sadness that’s been welling up inside my gut flips around into a hiccup and hides down in the dark parts of my stomach for another day.

When the big one strikes—and it will, as especially us in California know—you’re never properly prepared. When my dad’s mom died it was my senior year of college and a lot of how-do-you-say was hitting the fan. But my Nana’s death gave me something to align it all around, to channel frustrations about loss and change into. We mourned my Nana, and I bounced right through a breakup, my college graduation, and my first sexual assault unscathed. Or so she thought, growls the voiceover in this part of the movie.

I once wrote an essay about the time the guy who lived under my apartment hacked my computer and took pictures and videos with my own webcam, a case that turned out to involve a dozen local victims, one that, in fact, I just got a call about again this week. That first incident happened a few months before my Nana passed away. Part of my ability to handle it—to go to authorities, provide evidence, testify, and still ace a 20-unit semester—stemmed from a fight or flight response, but another part of it came from this well-practiced habit of suspending your real feelings when you feel uncertain about the future. My Nana had been sick for years at this point, since high school, since well before I left for college. I was used to my dad spending three, four, five nights a week at his parent’s house. I was used to thinking every call from him was the call. I was tired of that sort of braced, unfeeling dread, and so when the time finally came I was relieved. Not just for my Nana to be out of her misery or my father to be out of his nonstop care and vigilance, but for the wave of feelings—the kind that knock you off your feet, the kind that render you unstable and uncomfortably, forgivably so—that came along with it.

There were a set of years there that I thought I liked death. Everyone came together from all their scattered parts of life, got drunk and ate food and told stories, and I could finally feel things. We all had an excuse to not hold everything together, stop handling everything for just one day or week or moment. When my Nana died that New Year’s Eve eight years ago, I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed—but I didn’t know all that I was sobbing about until five, six, seven years later. Whenever my mother’s mother finally passes on—it might be Thanksgiving or Christmas, it might be well into next year—I know that I’ll be crying for her, but this time I’ll know that I’ll be crying for other things as well. I’m trying my hardest, lately, on these drives down and up I-5, on these happy hours at the local Chili’s, to comb through these recent years and guess what might come slamming through that final wave. Like it could make me any heavier. Like it could make me any more prepared.