When I woke up just before 4AM this morning, the first thing I realized was that
it was raining and I couldn't go row. This didn't take much conscious thought,
since what woke we two minutes before the alarm was She-Hulk calling to say it was
pouring over at her place and so she wasn't going to go row. (She's just back from
dealing with family emergencies and she and Rudder were supposed to take out the
double this morning. She didn't want to make him drive out there for nothing.) The
next thing I realized, even before going back to sleep, was that today is March 5,
my grandmother's birthday. She'd have been 92 today.
I know she was
86 when she died, so that makes it six years ago. It seems longer; in fact I just
mentioned to Baraita that it was "almost
a decade ago". Oops. I'm terrible at remembering death dates, though good at
birthdays, and somehow I always felt a little closer to Grandmom just because her
birthday was five days before mine. (In a similar way, I remember that a boy
around the corner when I was little had his on March 13, one cousin I haven't
talked to in years was born March 7, another March 11, a former coworker also
March 11, and a more recent former coworker on March 10, 1967, same day and year
as me. In twenty years I might not be in contact with any of these people but I'll
still know their birthdays.) In some ways I like the idea of remembering births
rather than deaths because it feels more like a celebration that I had wonderful
grandparents instead of a lament that they're gone.
We were always
close to my mother's parents. They lived less than a mile away and we used to
visit once or twice a week. My grandfather died the summer after my freshman year
in college. My grandmother kept living alone (her sister was just down the
street), and did some of the traveling my grandfather's heart condition had
prevented, but being on her own was a big adjustment. (Among other things, I don't
think she like not having anyone to argue with.) She had a heart attack a few
months after he died, and toward the end of the next decade had a couple of
congestive heart failures. As best I can tell after about 13 years of living on
her own, she decided that she'd been alone too long, she wanted to see my
grandfather again, and that her body was starting to fail her and more or less
stopped eating. She spent a few weeks in a nursing home where they tried to
persuade her to eat Ensure because she claimed anything else upset her stomach,
kept telling us she wanted to die, and did after not too long. I didn't make it to
her funeral, because I'd rushed in a few weeks before to see her and say goodbye.
I'm glad I did.
After I moved away, I tried to make it a point to
call her at least once a week, usually on Sundays. Every once in a while even now
I find myself thinking, "Oh, it's Sunday, I should call my grandmother," before I
realize that won't work. I take comfort in remembering that she was sure she would
see my grandfather again, that he was waiting somewhere for her. I don't know that
she had any structured view of what happens next, but I figure she was much older
than I am, had seen more death, was close to her own, and thus might have better
knowledge than I do. At any rate, I never feel like either of my grandparents are
far away. I don't much care if that's true or not; I can wait to find out, and
meantime, as Iris Dement sings, I'm content to "let the mystery be". Either I'll
see them again or it won't matter, but meanwhile it's a comforting feeling.