Saturday 'blogs are tough. For one thing, I really don't want to do them. I mean, it's Saturday, for crying out loud... who really wants to do anything on a Saturday? For another, I work 'til midnight most Fridays, so by the time I get home and unwind enough to go to sleep it's usually 1 or 2 in the morning, which makes it tough to get up and get an early start on my day. For the last couple of weeks, I've 'blogged right up until I had to leave for work, so hopefully I can get this in with plenty of time to still do a couple of other things around the apartment.
I've been thinking a lot about Grandma lately. I've mentioned her before, but without much explanation, so I thought I'd spend some time writing about/sharing her with you guys. I had the rare privilege of a great-grandmother up until last November. She was 92 years old and retained her sanity and relatively good health right up to the very end. She started having some health problems in January and by the end of the summer, her body was worn out. As the fall went on, she was in and out of the hospital on a monthly/weekly basis and right before Thanksgiving, she just couldn't go on anymore.
My great-grandmother was born in August of 1917, the same year as Desi Arnaz, Thelonious Monk, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. She died in November of 2009, the same year as Walter Cronkite, Bea Arthur, and Michael Jackson. It's weird to think of someone you love in terms of birth and death, especially a parent or grandparent. You grow up with this person having had no memorable beginning and having no perceivable end, and you get the impression that they'll never go away or change. You are introduced to this environment as the product of a birth, just like they were a thousand years before. They become as familiar to you as the settings they occupy, like the position of a piece of furniture or the color of the carpet. Then, when it changes, you get this disoriented feeling and think in terms of how things ought to be instead of being able to just accept the way they are. Birth almost never seems to do this. Death always does this.
My great-grandmother lived through a lot of births and a lot of death. She was there for the birth of every member of my family. She survived the loss of her own parents, her husband, one of her grandchildren and many, many others. She was born into one world war and built her own family during the second. She bore witness to the Great Depression, the moon landing, and the Oklahoma City bombing. She lived through radio, television, computers and cell phones.
There were times, especially toward the end, when it was hard to think this way about Grandma. She got so frail and weak, it was hard to remember times when she was independent. But she was. I remember as a child when she would call my grandparents from Houston to inform them that she had driven down to see my great-uncle Jerry and would be staying there for a few days. I remember how all the "little old ladies" in town (some were significantly younger than she was) would always ask her to drive them into Dallas-proper because she was the only one among them who knew her way around and wasn't afraid of downtown traffic. She had been through a lot in her life, and ended up with a lot of strength and wisdom because of it. She used to wonder out-loud, in the last decade or so of her life, why God had restricted her mobility and why she couldn't get around as much. I'm curious if it wasn't to force her to slow down and share it with the rest of us.
All said, I don't really miss my grandmother because I miss sharing things with her, or getting my picture taken with her, or getting presents from her, or anything that I really got from being with her. I just miss her. I miss stories the I never heard about family I never knew and the stories I've heard a million times before. I miss the way that time seems to be put in its proper perspective when it's around something old. I miss the calm assurances that come from 92 years of survival and the tested wisdom that carries someone that well for that long. I miss her laugh and the lines that creased her smile and carried more stories in them than she could ever tell. I miss the way we all seemed so small relative to the largeness that occupied her diminished and world-worn frame. I miss the hope she had of seeing her husband again and getting the Yahtzee and egg salad sandwiches ready for the rest of us when we joined her.
I miss my Grandma. But only for now...
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