To my brilliant, beloved, and wonderful grandmother...

I went home for Christmas and was lucky enough to see my grandmother right before she drifted off into the sleep with which she will end her life.  I spoke to my mom this afternoon and she confirmed that grandma hasn't woken up and will likely die within days.  I can't begin to explain how I felt the first time I saw her there at Wildflower, the home we've had to put her in.  This is a woman who I have looked up to my entire life and she was diminished to a skeletal creature in a wheelchair.  I couldn't stop crying that first visit.  It got better the next day, and the next, but only because I was able to disassociate and disconnect.  The woman in that chair was not the grandmother in my memory.  They were two different people.  

But finding out that she is leaving for good, that the end is here (mercifully sooner than anyone expected) is not as easy as I thought it would be.  Certainly I am glad that she (and my mother, who has born the entire weight of her care as well as my grandfather's) will be spared the years of senility that her own mother suffered.  But that doesn't change the fact that my grandma is dying.  She's going to be gone forever.  And in the end I find that I'm just a little girl who misses her grama and doesn't want her to leave and can't understand that it's better this way.  

I wanted to write something here to commemorate her.  Something that would represent what she was in my life.  But I couldn't think of anything better than the final that I wrote for my English Literature class on my study abroad in 2007.  With some minor alterations and additions, here it is

            The assignment was to write an essay that related the class readings to the places they’d visited.  My fingers hovered above the keys expectantly—waiting for inspiration to strike.  All that struck was a hand on my bedroom door, giving me a distraction from my un-inspired thoughts.  The harder I tried to focus the more my mind wandered.  I asked myself how ideas might relate to places…

            I’d heard of memories being related to smells, and smells could be related to places.  For instance, I remember very distinctly the smell of my grandmother’s food-room back in New Mexico.  It was a cold smell and somehow pleasantly musty.  Like the smell of damp earth, even though the room was above ground.  Whenever I smell that smell I remember the room, cool and dark, even when the light was on.  It was one of my favorite places at my grandmother’s house, especially when it was my grandmother who took me there.  And because I loved my grandmother’s food room, I loved the food-room in my aunt’s house, and then finally the one in my mom’s new house. 

            The connection, then, was food-rooms to the idea of my grandmother, I supposed.  But really, that was not an example of an idea being connected with a place, except in barest technicality.  In actuality it was simply a fragment of my definition of my grandmother.  It was part of what made my grandmother in my mind.  She was many places and things and actions and ideas. 

I considered the idea of my grandmother and saw a kaleidoscope of things:  My grandmother teaching my addition; admonishing me to “burn the sums into my brain”.  My grandmother giving me raisins out of a Tupperware pitcher with a yellow lid as I sat on the wooden stool in the corner of the kitchen.  My grandmother bringing me a golf ball-sized blob of peanut butter cookie dough as I played in my uncle’s room on the green fuzzy carpet.  Then, more, after they all moved to Oregon.  I saw my grandmother’s small brown dish, or the blue plastic one, with two small scoops of Tin Roof Sundae ice cream in it and her sneakiest smile that told me this was a treat just for us.  I heard my grandmother teaching me and my brother one single phrase of Latin to say to the kids at school when they were mean.  There was my grandma sitting with my mother and uncle, singing “Dooley”.  Overarching them all were the bookshelves full of carefully organized and jealously guarded books.  Endless shelves hiding tempting treasures.  Sherlock Holmes and Freckles and Wind in the Willows.  That part of my grandmother that was a passionate love of books was also a part of me.

            I thought about these aspects of my grandmother.  I thought about the things that I refused to accept as part of her.  Those first years when the most articulate woman I knew started forgetting words; joking in the yellow light of our kitchen about the time when all it would take to entertain her would be the magnets on the fridge.  We’d cackled all the more at the looks of others who couldn't understand our morbid sense of humor, that it was better to laugh than cry.  Then the breathtakingly quick crescendo from a disoriented woman who wandered ceaselessly around her house and still harmonized at the family singalongs even if she couldn't remember the words…to a stranger huddled in a wheelchair in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar building, mumbling indistinctly from lips that were no longer quite under her control.    

None of these memories were places, though places were a part of the memories.  Yes, there were places in my mind, but to limit my grandmother to one place was like limiting the ocean to one grain of sand on one beach.  Would that be the same for anything? 

I remembered when we read “A Room of One’s Own” in class; how, before I even began to read, my mind resolved to like the story, based only on the fact that, long ago, my grandmother told me that someday I needed to read it.  Now I had read it, and liked it very much.  I thought it was brilliant, in fact.  But the only thing I could remember distinctly was that the book was everlastingly bound to my grandmother.  So, it seemed that a book could be connected to one single thing; perhaps if that single thing contained many things within it.  Perhaps it was only because it was my grandmother to which it was connected, and my grandmother contained all of me.

My mind floated back to the beginning.  There were my fingers, still expectant.  There was the screen, still blank.  Another hand was knocking at my door.  I smiled at the thought of my grandmother and began to type.