Very happy to see it created! I always got along better with my grandma than with my mom. Her husband had died when I was a baby so I never knew my grandfather. My grandma had interesting books and record albums and I could talk to her about whatever was going on in my brain. My mom and I had nothing in common and we just couldn't relate emotionally. There's a lot more I'm not going into. So anyway, when I was 18 my grandma had cancer and it had metastasized everywhere, and I think we knew she wouldn't be leaving the hospital. We went to visit every day and I stopped giving a shit about school or yearbook editor duties or anything. I can't remember if I cried before she died...even afterward, I must never have cried in front of my mom because I remember her being angry with me for being so unfeeling. It wasn't that, I just never had my feelings validated by her, so most of the time I didn't know HOW I even felt, and when I did know, it was useless to try to discuss it with her, because she would either disagree with me (I couldn't possibly be feeling that if it wasn't what SHE felt), or she'd say it was over her head (she didn't understand). This has become very convoluted, sorry.
The seminal moment is when I woke up one morning and my mom was in the livingroom in tears, and she simply said "she's gone." My immediate reaction was NOT grief, it was an overwhelming sadness that my mom was now an orphan. In that moment I felt nothing but deep sadness for my mom, this woman who I could not relate with, who thought I was unfeeling, who had been emotionally neglectful my whole life. None of that mattered, she was my mom and now she was an orphan and in that moment that was the worst thing I could imagine. I hugged her and she thought we were comforting each other over grandma's death, but I was comforting her for her newfound orphan state.
That experience really made an impression on me. I was really blindsided by that.
But yeah, our relationship didn't change until many many years later after we had stopped speaking to each other for six years. Now we get along much better because I had time to become a real, separate person, and strong enough to have my own opinions and feelings.