Is this a grief reaction or a sign I should move back to my hometown?

[Quonder]

My Grandmother is terminally ill and she's just been moved to a hospice this weekend. I'm overwhelmed with guilt and regret that I don't live near her. I've just got home after visiting her and it's such an intense painful feeling. Like I've done the most terrible thing by moving away. My Grandparents raised me in my early years and I've always been really close to them and we visit about four times year, more in the last couple of years as they've got more frail. But I moved away to go to uni and I have a career and kids settled in schools in a city in the north. They live in a coastal town in the south east which I've always felt I couldn't afford to move back to but now I'm thinking I didn't try hard enough and there must have been a way I could have managed it. I keep waking up in a panic that I'm living the wrong life in the wrong place. I'm feeling this all encompassing panic that I should have made the decision to move back to my hometown after uni 15 years ago and need to find a way to go back in time. Part of me wants to move back now, immediately, but part of me knows it's too late now and almost seems like an insult to move now at the end of her life when if only I'd moved back after uni we wouldn't have lost so much time. I can't say to people in real life because she's 90 I know people will think I should have been prepared but I just can't believe we've run out of time. She was one of those people you thought would live forever.

I think it's a (pretty natural) reaction to current circumstances - you will have been making the best decisions you could with the information and resources you had all the way along. She will have been happy that you've been living your best life z

Thanks for replying. I feel so pulled apart. Like everything I was certain of doesn't make sense anymore.

A feature of post-death grief I have found is wanting to do things that have at their core a desire to bring you closer to the person you are grieving for. This can be mainstream like going to their town, reading books they liked, listening to music they liked, wearing their clothes or slightly weirder stuff like buying things you have no use for because they would have liked it.

This may be a feature of anticipatory grief too. Who knows?

There are three rules:
1.there is no right or wrong for any kind of grief - do what comforts you.
2.follow your heart because it's worse to live with a regret of something not done or not said.
3.Avoid taking huge and permenant life altering decisions for at least 18 months after the death - so if you want to move, rent rather than buy, if you hate your job, take a sabbatical rather than quit that type of thing.