012408 - Grandmothers

Any of you reading this clearly read my blogs and know that I am a somewhat morbid person.

My grandmother is dying.

She is the giver of all the life my giant family possesses. She is shockingly tough to the tune of: she delivered all of her children without the care of a doctor, two of them in a cotton field, one on the way to California to pick grapes. She buried a husband and continued with their farm for 25 years. She waited until she was 82 to stop raising cattle because she didn't think it was respectable any more for a lady of her age to drive a tractor and bale hay…she is remarkable…in every thinkable way she astonishes me with her strength.

She raised me for many years, became my Mother when my own Mother couldn't be there. She is perfection, but has always thought she was ugly. She possessed this inner light that couldn't be stifled no matter what atrocities she witnessed…and she witnessed so many. She is a devout Christian and a simple woman. She isn't a "thinker"; she's never read Proust or learned a Romantic language. She played the fiddle once…by ear, just because she thought it was beautiful…she told me. She slept with a Colt 45 at the head of her bed and knew how to use it. She worked so hard in her life that her hands were as rough as sandpaper and it is that, not the buttery softness of skin that I associate with my Grannie. She made cornbread of such fine quality that everyone fought for the corners to get that crispness and lightness of food prepared with intense love. She grew corn so high that I swore, as a child, I could climb up and sit with God. She grew things; trees, cattle, kids, corn, beans. She IS home. There is no other for me. There can't be. I don't pray as often as she would like, I'm sure, but when I do, I pray for the strength that only her blood in my veins can give me. The ability to give and love so deeply that not even death itself can scratch the surface of my memory

Every Christmas I've been alive, and many before that, our family have gathered in her home. This year, for the first time, she couldn't summon the strength to cook. So we all cooked and cleaned for her. And all the while, she lay on the couch in the family room. She looked defeated. She, goddess of hearth and home, she lay there with no energy, jaundiced and spent. I asked her not long ago if while she lay there it occurred to her that she had created all of us. That she was the nebula from which we, her sprawling family had sprung. It had never occurred to her; though she is proud that she raised 5 children with 9 children of their own and 9 children of theirs. We are a strong and loving family; varied in strengths derived from her. Magnificent in the ability to love unconditionally which, on the whole, has been so deeply fixed in us by her willingness to give everything she ever had to us. In that way, more than any other, she is with us always and will continue giving guidance, love, and comfort long after her body is gone.

And now, she is dying. And I can't be sad for her. Because when I was a child, young and unable to sleep, she would talk with me and tell me stories about her youth and her girlhood and how much she loved her life and her strength and she never wanted to not be strong. She is no longer strong. So while I am certainly going to miss her, I am not sad, because she lived her life the way I'd like to live my own. In her ability to seize her life and give it all to us, her motly crew of kids, she lives on always.

I am so grateful my son has met her; that I have photos of him with her. That he will some day know from what strong folks he is born.