Memories ... of the way we were #1
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My grandmother died -- 52 years ago today. My world was on the cusp of changing more than I had ever imagined it could -- and that event, so pivotal at the time, would turn out to be not even the center of the storm that was coming.
Ours was a difficult and complicated relationship, especially toward the end. Yet it remains in its fashion, the most positive human connection I have ever known. My grandmother loved me. Probably the only person who ever has. Ever. She loved me ... and I loved her back ... and that was a problem.
She and my parents did not get along. It took me years to understand why. That she and I were so compatible, that we found such joy in each other's presence ... it made me an alien soul. The situation went downhill from there.
I was nineteen when our time together came to a close. I had lived with her for the past two years, going to school at Texas Tech. My goal then was to finish college in three years ... going to summer school, taking 21 units a semester in the regular term. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I was a junior when she died. She was 67.
She worked as an obstetrics nurse at Methodist Hospital. She lied about her age to edge under the cut-off to qualify for training. I sent flowers one year to the hospital on her birthday. She had to tell me not to do that again. And she told me why.
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My memories of our last months together are fuzzy, full of rage and confusion. She would have meltdowns and tantrums over odd, unpredictable things. (I put the ironing board away one evening because I was expecting some friends to drop by and she went ballistic over my friends that were "too good to see an ironing board set up in the room.") Months later I learned -- after she died -- that serious painkillers had gone missing from the hospital -- and toward the end she was probably self-medicating on the sly.
She insisted that I go back to my parents in Arizona for Easter break that last year. I wasn't happy about it. The time with them was every bit as awful as I knew it would be. When I came back to Lubbock and she picked me up at the airport, she told me she'd had to have her appendix removed -- to explain why she was so pale and thinner ... and the incision I saw later across her stomach. That, too, was a lie -- but there was no way to prove it.
A few weeks later, she took me to a "viewing" for a nurse she said she'd known for a while. I thought this was odd, because I didn't know this woman as a friend of hers ... so going there -- to that -- didn't make much sense. But as it turned out, that meant my grandmother was not the first dead person I ever saw. I don't know if that's what she meant at the time, but I have come to accept that as a gift.
Between the end of Easter break and the end of the school semester that year, she made arrangements for me to learn to drive, something my parents wouldn't hear of while I was living when them. When we would go somewhere, I would drive. She said, "for the practice." Looking back, of course, there were other reasons.
I remember one evening she tried to tell me how ill she was. She may have tried to tell me she was dying. I didn't want this conversation. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to deal with it. I shut it down and waved it away. My life was too complicated already. I didn't want to hear those words. I didn't want one more issue to handle. But, of course, the silence didn't change a thing. Except we could go on pretending.
When the semester ended, she wanted me to go back to Tucson for the summer. She said I needed a break. She said I'd been pushing too hard at school all those months. She said she needed some time alone. She said we'd both start fresh again in the fall.
There in the airport, we hugged good-bye for the last time. She had to have known it. I didn't. No way to put anything into words.
The neighbors said she never returned to work from that point on. On July 4, one of her friends called my mother and said my grandmother had checked herself into the hospital. This friend wasn't supposed to tell anyone, but she said my mother needed to come.
Four days later, my mother phoned -- just after 10 in the evening. We packed in silence and drove through the night.
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Fact? or Fiction? Either way well written and made me cry. Your grandmother reminds me of a nicer version of my Mother.
Very much fact. Steemit provides a unique opportunity to get a lot of stuff "out of my head" and onto the computer screen. That itself is a very therapeutic act -- and I intend to use this blog for that.
Every so often I find people who write about how Steemit has changed their lives -- to the point they feel they need to introduce themselves again. They don't seem to understand why, but they are both puzzled by and grateful for that.
Journaling is a form of therapy. The chance to reminisce, to relive certain experiences and events, to examine yourself and your past, to understand things differently in light of maturity or new information -- it changes a person. It changes perspectives. You can come to terms with difficult moments. It helps you make different decisions and choices. Clearly, that's part of the change.
Going forward, I know most of the pieces that fill this theme won't be easy to write. I spent most of the day yesterday lost in memories of the past -- specifically our past together. Remarkably, it occurred to me for the first time that just as she was the one person in the world who loved me ... I was almost certainly the one person in the world who loved her. It explains why we "clicked" -- and why the rest of my family and I didn't.
Had I understood that fact in that way at the time, it would have transformed our whole relationship into something ... different. Maybe it would have changed us both for the better.
I also thought for the first time ... what it must have been like for her at that final parting -- watching me walk away into a future she would soon no longer be able to help, driving back home again into what lay ahead for her. The loneliness and terror must have been wrenching.
So I have promised myself that what I write here will be the absolute truth as I know it -- often unpleasant but all of it real. None of the major players are alive any more. No way to defend themselves on the one hand. No way to pressure me into protecting their feelings on the other. That honesty is another thing therapists reach for.
I tell myself nobody has to read it but me -- and there's a very good chance nobody will. That's the paradoxical beauty of Steemit. Something is both preserved forever and likely lost twenty minutes after it's published.
What remains is whatever changed.
Those changes are why some people here come to realize ... they have been born anew.
Thanks for stopping by. Srsly. I'm glad it spoke to you, too.
I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I ever doubted it for a minute.
That is so sad! But like you say, excellent therapy writing about stuff like that! We tend to sweep bad memories under the carpet but they fester until it's brought out into the open, almost like a cleansing, so steemit is an excellent platform for memories like that as it probably will only be seen by a handful so it does not really matter, but you got it off your chest and it's in the open!
Strange how complex some relationships can be!
If you ever get the time do yourself a favour and google Mark Wolynn who wrote the book 'It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are'. There are some youtube videos available on his work.
Then there's Family Constellation Therapy as well.
It's very interesting how 'unfinished business' is passed on to the generations to follow so we should all put pen to paper so to speak and not hide stuff that's whispered behind closed doors but festers all the time!