For all of my almost 33 years, I've had a role model; someone to look at as the guide for my walk into womanhood. It wasn't someone famous, exremely wealthy, or well educated in all of the normal meanings of those words. Rather, it was a woman of paradoxes, a woman who was so many things all rolled up into one big ball of almost perfection. I've had the pleasure of trying to emulate my grandmother for almost three decades and now I see an era quickly coming to a dramatic end.
My grandmother loves to feed her birds. She has about five birdfeeders on a postage stamp sized piece of land in a suburb of Detroit. Every morning and every evening she goes out and single handedly fills five birdfeeders up with sunflowers, finch food, and other birdseed mixes. When I was younger, those bird feeders and the bird baths used to attract all kinds of blue jays and robins. Now that suburban Detroit is overrun by pigeons, that's mostly what she gets but she feeds the birds anyway, hoping that one of them might be something pretty to look at. When gram does this, she wears her flannel jacket and a pair of boots and yet, for any other even, even bowling, she dresses to the nines. It's not unusual for her to put on lipstick and a few nice bracelets just to go shopping at the grocery store. Appearances are important to her, but so is praciticality.
Everything that I know about being polite came from gram. I instinctively put my napkin on my lap and I bring my food to me, not me to my food, just as she has instructed me since I was a small girl. I still use my pleases, thank you's, yes ma'am's and no sir's and they all came from her guidance. From the time I was about five, we would have these tea parties that were the real deal. We'd nibble on cookies and sip tea from beautiful china cups. My gram has a whole collection of them that hang in a cabinet in her living room. Still to this day, I love the taste of hot tea and I always leave my pinky finger out just like she taught me. It's a force of habit.
I think that because of all of these lessons on manners and training on how to be a woman, I was surprised to learn that my gram was a pinup girl during World War II. I just found this out a few years ago and it floored me. My upright grandmother had pictures taken for men's enjoyment! I guess it was all in the name of love of country. I've seen the pictures and they're tastefully done. In some, she's wearing cute little dresses. In one she's acting like she's going to throw a snowball. I can't believe how absolutely stunning she is in those pictures. She had this 40's glamour going on and she looked so young, so uninhibited and so...improper!
The best part of this story is that she was sending the pictures to her fiance, my grandfather. They were accompanied by many many letters. I was saddened to hear that when my grandfather returned home, the two of them gathered all of the letters together and burned them ceremoniously as an act of reuniting. I really wish that I could see what they had written back and forth. It would be another piece of her that I'd get to see for the first time.
Gram is 81 now and for so long, she always seemed so young. I finally feel as if her age is catching up with her. She came to visit us last October and my sister made the comment that she was acting like a marshmallow person--all kind of squishy but not really there--not our gram. Still, I tried to cling on. I asked her to tell me about her childhood and her teenage years. I am trying to keep a record of all of this so that it is not lost. We had some good conversations and I clung on to the idea that gram is still gram underneath all the squishiness. I mean, she still dressed like gram and she was still telling me that I needed to pull my shoulders back and not slouch.
Last month, my mom called. She was making the eight hour trip to Michigan the next day. Gram had fallen getting out of bed and had broken her hip. That news tore me up. My independent grandma was now seriously injured. While my mom and dad were in Michigan, I was on the cell phone constantly with my mom. Every time we talked, I fell apart a little more. Horrible news flies at me like stray arrows. The doctors say that she probably will never walk again. My mom and uncle were searching for a rehabilitation center. She was hallucinating and seeing her husband who died more than 40 years ago. She was combative.
In the month since her hip fracture, my gram has been in a rehab learning how to use a walker. My mom went back to Michigan last week because my grandmother was supposed to leave the rehab and she wanted to help her settle in at home. When mom got there, grandma had some sort of stomach virus and wasn't going to be released. My mother stayed for a day and turned around to go home.
I just found out today that my mom is going back tomorrow. Gram is supposed to be released again. Hopefully this really happens because she weighs 85 pounds now and she's refusing to eat. She says she needs to feed her birds.
While I'm clinging to any bit of the memory of the quintessential woman that my grandmother has become in my life, I feel as if it's being ripped from my fingers slowly. I'm searching for a way to honor her, to say to myself--and to what's left of her--that her simple yet extraordinary life had purpose. I've been preparing myself for this for awhile but it hurts in a way that I can't even comprehend to actually realize that an end to her life might be near.
Hopefully one day I can be this sort of grandma to someone else. I am waiting. I am hoping.
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