Faiding flowers and broken wings. You are still remembered.

Just grass. Fucking grass.
How was anyone to know that beneath this plot of earth rested the center of a little boy's universe?  
How could they know?
Aside from the poorly dug up holes in the ground.
Holes that held top secret letters from years past written by a lost boy desperately trying to reach out and connect to the stars.
 
My heart felt as empty as that grave looked.
My family never had much money to speak of and the cost of tomb stones seemed an unrealistic idea seeing as I NEEDED something there for her immediately.
So I got my keys and sped over to the house she raised me in.
 
In the front yard there was a concrete angel.
As I pulled into the driveway I seen her still standing where my family had placed her. That being years prior the close and personal understanding we would all come to have of cancer.
As I approached the ruins that she now stood in I could almost smell the flowers that once nearly consumed her.
Knife wounds awoken from their slumber and reopened in my heart as I glanced at the house that resembled the state of the statue I came to collect.
What once was a place of warmth and surrender was now replaced by a sad and rundown shack that embodied the idea of the loneliness we all felt since her passing.
I stayed only long enough to do what I came for.
 
As I placed the sad looking figure at the top of my grandmothers grave embarrassment overcame me for a moment.  
She was weathered.
She was old.
And she only had one wing.  
The shame I felt was quickly replaced by a familiar feeling that I had since forgotten.
As if being embraced by her arms again I felt that warmth and love surround me.
The bitter weight I had been holding for so long seemed simultaneously lifted with the realization that she was that angel to me.
Life and experiences had aged and weathered her.
Her wings were once broken during her stay with us here.
But despite everything she had gone through.  
Despite her fight.
Despite her sacrifices.
Despite the moments she lost nearly everything.
She was concrete to me.
 
Now an angel stands to mark a place where mine rests.
 
The world may see a sad looking statue  
and that's okay.
Because instead of an engraved stone that would read the dates of her birth and death she has a symbol of her life and how I will always remember her to be.
A survivor of the elements.
An angel earthed for the time she spent with us who's wings have since mended and is now flying free.
 
Grandma, You will never be forgotten.
I love you, ALWAYS and FOREVER.
 
**Kiss your hand and place it to your heart. Know wherever you are, I am**