![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Come on now child, we're gonna go for a ride
On June 14th, 2007, sometime in the afternoon, Granny died. At 9:15 pm that evening, my father called to tell me. I got off the train a stop early so I could call him back and we chatted for close to fifteen minutes. He told me she’d been in hospice care, they knew it would happen soon, it was only a matter of time, and that she died of a respiratory failure. Even while typing that word, I had a time spelling it, I kept hearing how he said it, with his relatively thick southern accent: “RES-patory”.
When I heard the voicemail, I had a feeling that’s what the news was, but of course during the 40 minute train ride I couldn’t help but think of other possible family passings or sicknesses. I even briefly considered it was my mother, except my father’s voice was solemn and tender but steady in a way that I don’t think he could maintain if he lost my mother.
Granny was my mother’s mother. My father’s parents died when I was young – Gran when I was four, I think (I have very faint memories of her in a pink terrycloth bathrobes and mostly being in bed when I hugged her). His father, Granddaddy died when I was seven – my first experience with death, and my memories of him are more clear – picking strawberries from his garden, him going into the blueberry bush to pick berries for me, the way he said “coca-cola”, the pecan tree in the backyard, his screened porch, the sound of the train at night when I slept there, his smell, the scratch of his face when I hugged him. When he died he had a drawer of things and I could choose one and I chose a pocket knife that had a pen on it, instead of a harmonica in an alligator case, which is one of my few regrets in life. But the pocket knife is significant too, as my grandfather always carried one, along with change and a handkerchief and a comb. My father was the same way, though without the knife later on. I wouldn’t be surprised if today he still had a white handkerchief, a comb, and a tube of cherry chapstick in his pockets right now. I am my father’s child in the way of having routines related to pockets and wallets.
But this is about my other grandparent, the one I saw the most and knew the best, but didn’t really know because I was a child. But also because Granny, like most of my family, didn’t have a big personality. She was in many ways the quintessential American small town grandmother who cooked and sewed clothes and sat in her glider rocker while she watched her favorite programs and played scrabble, at least before it became too difficult for her to focus on a game, which happened while I was in my teens, after her heart surgery.
When I visited David two years ago, he told me about going to see her, how it was hard, how she still had moments of being herself, the quiet woman who appeared to have a hint of a scowl that was just years of wrinkles from five kids and a dozen grandkids. I never remember her ever being unkind, or even stern. She loved cookies and banana pudding with nilla wafers and black eyed peas and cornbread and cinnamon rolls. After smoking for years, she was forced to quit because of her heart, but in the months immediately following, she was known to walk around with an unlit one in her mouth. She liked cute Christmas ornaments and other paraphernalia of the season. Her occasional bursts into song at unexpected moments, like once in the backseat of the car when we were crowded together (her, me, my brother) and she started singing Bill Withers “Lean on Me”. I remember the smell of her perms and how tightly she hugged me sometimes, so much that it almost hurt. She was a nurse at Forrest General hospital and she was probably a little nervous at first with working with all her black co-workers, but by the time she retired, they adored each other, I remember them telling my so when I met them in town because its Hattiesburg, you go to the store and you run into people you worked with, you went to school with. My grandmother taught my mother and my aunts and uncles the basic principle that all people are equal and to never use certain “hateful words”, but we are still small town white southerners, there are realities.
My brother got married in 1997 and for his wedding gift, my grandmother made him and my sister-in-law a quilt – it was white and green and had small flowers and she had embroidered on the bottom their names and the date of the wedding. At the same time, but a little off to the side in the next room, she gave me a quilt. It was square and colorful, an asymmetric patchwork of patterns and materials. She told me it came from her box of swatches that she had been holding onto for years, decades. My mom and my aunt said they recognized certain fabrics from skirts or jumpers she had made for them as a kid. My grandmother always treated my brother and I equally, also we were the oldest of the grandkids, the ones she knew the longest and the best, before things started to fade. She knew she wouldn’t be making any more quilts, and I didn’t have any immediate plans for marriage, so my gift came now.
I just went down to the basement and pulled it out of the dresser and put it in the washer. It is June, it is not quilt weather. But it might get cold at night up in the woods this weekend, so I am taking it camping.
This morning I went out to the porch and pulled out the first stack of photos from a box and found a few of her, and my favorite is grainy and underdeveloped but I’m maybe 4 or 5 years old, sitting in her lap, we’re reclining in a leather chair and my mother is sitting next to us looking off-camera. Granny is looking right at the lens, as am I, and she’s talking to me. I am completely relaxed and wrapped up in her arms.
I have known for years that I probably wouldn’t see her again, because of the distance from my parents, because I had no idea who in the extended family ‘knew’ about me. I don’t know if my grandmother knew how I lived now. I made the choice of silence, which had a cost – either she knew I lived as a man and it hurt her, or she didn’t know and thought I had forgotten my grandmother. Neither one is something to feel particularly good about. But I’m also not hard on myself about it, I know I am not the only family member who didn’t maintain the best contact in these last few years, and I know its not all my fault for the silence and distance. Instead I have to believe in the ability to send messages of love and gratitude through the ether, across hundreds of miles, and, now, maybe even across the spirit world.
* * *
The grief is still slowly sinking in and will probably be around for a little while as background feelings and thoughts. What I am perhaps more stunned by, is that I talked to my mother last night. I haven’t heard her voice in perhaps five years. My father said to me, after chatting for 10 minutes “would you like to talk to mom? I think she’s like to hear from you.” And I was takenaback and said, of course. Of course I want to talk to her, if she wants to talk to me, then yes, of course I do. It was brief, she was still in shock herself, I think, because even though you know something is coming, you can’t really prepare for it happening, the losing of your mother. After a few minutes she asked if I wanted to talk to my father again, and I said yes. We exchanged goodbyes and I-love-yous, then I did the same with my father after wishing him a safe trip, and what stuck me when I hung up the phone was how absolutely normal the conversation was, that it sounded just like it would, when parents call their children. Though they did both say a couple times “well, we just wanted you to know, we knew you’d want to know.” Which, ok, is maybe a little strange for the occasion, except given our history. I thanked them several times for letting me know, as I had feared in the past they would contact me long after the fact. Granny asked to be cremated, my father said the memorial service would be tiny, if there was one at all, which eliminated the discussion about whether I should/could come down there. I said to keep me updated, if they think of it. For the first time, I could just sort of act how I wanted with them, not really concern myself with what they thought, how they felt. I said what I wanted on the phone to them, I didn’t hold back, even if they probably find my way of talking so openly about emotions somewhat strange. I didn’t care and I think it helped.
I also learned, during one of my father’s tangents about contacting my mom’s brothers and sisters, that my aunt Judy has been unreachable, and she is supposedly “in Texas chasing horses”. My aunt was perhaps a woman on the verge, when I saw her last at age 16 and she was about to be divorced. The way my father described her as off the radar, all phone numbers are dead ends and she has been ‘going through her own things’, I couldn’t help but think for a moment, is this how people talk about me at family functions? Perhaps I need to find my aunt who chases horses.
When I heard the voicemail, I had a feeling that’s what the news was, but of course during the 40 minute train ride I couldn’t help but think of other possible family passings or sicknesses. I even briefly considered it was my mother, except my father’s voice was solemn and tender but steady in a way that I don’t think he could maintain if he lost my mother.
Granny was my mother’s mother. My father’s parents died when I was young – Gran when I was four, I think (I have very faint memories of her in a pink terrycloth bathrobes and mostly being in bed when I hugged her). His father, Granddaddy died when I was seven – my first experience with death, and my memories of him are more clear – picking strawberries from his garden, him going into the blueberry bush to pick berries for me, the way he said “coca-cola”, the pecan tree in the backyard, his screened porch, the sound of the train at night when I slept there, his smell, the scratch of his face when I hugged him. When he died he had a drawer of things and I could choose one and I chose a pocket knife that had a pen on it, instead of a harmonica in an alligator case, which is one of my few regrets in life. But the pocket knife is significant too, as my grandfather always carried one, along with change and a handkerchief and a comb. My father was the same way, though without the knife later on. I wouldn’t be surprised if today he still had a white handkerchief, a comb, and a tube of cherry chapstick in his pockets right now. I am my father’s child in the way of having routines related to pockets and wallets.
But this is about my other grandparent, the one I saw the most and knew the best, but didn’t really know because I was a child. But also because Granny, like most of my family, didn’t have a big personality. She was in many ways the quintessential American small town grandmother who cooked and sewed clothes and sat in her glider rocker while she watched her favorite programs and played scrabble, at least before it became too difficult for her to focus on a game, which happened while I was in my teens, after her heart surgery.
When I visited David two years ago, he told me about going to see her, how it was hard, how she still had moments of being herself, the quiet woman who appeared to have a hint of a scowl that was just years of wrinkles from five kids and a dozen grandkids. I never remember her ever being unkind, or even stern. She loved cookies and banana pudding with nilla wafers and black eyed peas and cornbread and cinnamon rolls. After smoking for years, she was forced to quit because of her heart, but in the months immediately following, she was known to walk around with an unlit one in her mouth. She liked cute Christmas ornaments and other paraphernalia of the season. Her occasional bursts into song at unexpected moments, like once in the backseat of the car when we were crowded together (her, me, my brother) and she started singing Bill Withers “Lean on Me”. I remember the smell of her perms and how tightly she hugged me sometimes, so much that it almost hurt. She was a nurse at Forrest General hospital and she was probably a little nervous at first with working with all her black co-workers, but by the time she retired, they adored each other, I remember them telling my so when I met them in town because its Hattiesburg, you go to the store and you run into people you worked with, you went to school with. My grandmother taught my mother and my aunts and uncles the basic principle that all people are equal and to never use certain “hateful words”, but we are still small town white southerners, there are realities.
My brother got married in 1997 and for his wedding gift, my grandmother made him and my sister-in-law a quilt – it was white and green and had small flowers and she had embroidered on the bottom their names and the date of the wedding. At the same time, but a little off to the side in the next room, she gave me a quilt. It was square and colorful, an asymmetric patchwork of patterns and materials. She told me it came from her box of swatches that she had been holding onto for years, decades. My mom and my aunt said they recognized certain fabrics from skirts or jumpers she had made for them as a kid. My grandmother always treated my brother and I equally, also we were the oldest of the grandkids, the ones she knew the longest and the best, before things started to fade. She knew she wouldn’t be making any more quilts, and I didn’t have any immediate plans for marriage, so my gift came now.
I just went down to the basement and pulled it out of the dresser and put it in the washer. It is June, it is not quilt weather. But it might get cold at night up in the woods this weekend, so I am taking it camping.
This morning I went out to the porch and pulled out the first stack of photos from a box and found a few of her, and my favorite is grainy and underdeveloped but I’m maybe 4 or 5 years old, sitting in her lap, we’re reclining in a leather chair and my mother is sitting next to us looking off-camera. Granny is looking right at the lens, as am I, and she’s talking to me. I am completely relaxed and wrapped up in her arms.
I have known for years that I probably wouldn’t see her again, because of the distance from my parents, because I had no idea who in the extended family ‘knew’ about me. I don’t know if my grandmother knew how I lived now. I made the choice of silence, which had a cost – either she knew I lived as a man and it hurt her, or she didn’t know and thought I had forgotten my grandmother. Neither one is something to feel particularly good about. But I’m also not hard on myself about it, I know I am not the only family member who didn’t maintain the best contact in these last few years, and I know its not all my fault for the silence and distance. Instead I have to believe in the ability to send messages of love and gratitude through the ether, across hundreds of miles, and, now, maybe even across the spirit world.
* * *
The grief is still slowly sinking in and will probably be around for a little while as background feelings and thoughts. What I am perhaps more stunned by, is that I talked to my mother last night. I haven’t heard her voice in perhaps five years. My father said to me, after chatting for 10 minutes “would you like to talk to mom? I think she’s like to hear from you.” And I was takenaback and said, of course. Of course I want to talk to her, if she wants to talk to me, then yes, of course I do. It was brief, she was still in shock herself, I think, because even though you know something is coming, you can’t really prepare for it happening, the losing of your mother. After a few minutes she asked if I wanted to talk to my father again, and I said yes. We exchanged goodbyes and I-love-yous, then I did the same with my father after wishing him a safe trip, and what stuck me when I hung up the phone was how absolutely normal the conversation was, that it sounded just like it would, when parents call their children. Though they did both say a couple times “well, we just wanted you to know, we knew you’d want to know.” Which, ok, is maybe a little strange for the occasion, except given our history. I thanked them several times for letting me know, as I had feared in the past they would contact me long after the fact. Granny asked to be cremated, my father said the memorial service would be tiny, if there was one at all, which eliminated the discussion about whether I should/could come down there. I said to keep me updated, if they think of it. For the first time, I could just sort of act how I wanted with them, not really concern myself with what they thought, how they felt. I said what I wanted on the phone to them, I didn’t hold back, even if they probably find my way of talking so openly about emotions somewhat strange. I didn’t care and I think it helped.
I also learned, during one of my father’s tangents about contacting my mom’s brothers and sisters, that my aunt Judy has been unreachable, and she is supposedly “in Texas chasing horses”. My aunt was perhaps a woman on the verge, when I saw her last at age 16 and she was about to be divorced. The way my father described her as off the radar, all phone numbers are dead ends and she has been ‘going through her own things’, I couldn’t help but think for a moment, is this how people talk about me at family functions? Perhaps I need to find my aunt who chases horses.