May's Reign of Terror Continues

My grandmother passed away on Wednesday.

She was 94 years old. When my father wrote his eulogy, he gave it to me to read since I was his back-up plan, should the funeral service leave him too emotional to deliver it himself (I'm the usual go-to in these situations since I have a weird and kind of unnerving ability to maintain my composure in such circumstances). He told me that he wanted the people at the service to come away with an impression of his mother's whole life- rather than what we would more naturally focus on, which is the last twenty or so years of her life.

My grandmother was a strong, complicated smart-ass, for lack of a better word. Putting her next to my mother's mother, who is now 95, was always a study. My maternal grandmother is the epitome of sweetness, absorbing the world's joys and sorrows with an almost childlike innocence. Gram, on the other hand, was more likely to swear and ask you for a scotch on the rocks. Obviously, this isn't a complete picture of who she was but it's the one I've had in my head for practically my whole life. Hence my dad's dilemma.

And it worked. It painted the picture for who she was, for the near-century she was on this earth. In a strange way, it makes her more real to me- this 3-D picture I have of a woman who loved to dance, who dumped her fiance to marry my grandfather, who once socked the leader of a neighborhood gang who threatened my dad when he was 12, who, with the help of her siblings, helped raise my father's cousin, left motherless at childbirth, and remained devoted to him throughout her life. She shrugged off the Depression as no big deal. She worked in a chocolate factory and she was a lunch lady after my grandfather died.

Real is good. Perspective is good. We all want to live to an old age but we forget what that brings with it- that we can so easily be reduced to who we are at an old age, rather than who we've been our whole lives.

Unfortunately, with it comes yet more sadness and a little regret that we didn't ask the right questions or keep the whole picture in mind when we had the chance.