Lost Grandmothers

The first funeral I attended was that of my grandmother.  I was twelve.  Because of my tender age and relative inexperience with such things, I was shocked that she had died, but I felt I should be sadder.  I knew that something had changed in my life, but my grandmother and I did not share a close relationship, so, I realize now, there was nothing vital for me to miss.

I knew her, sure, on the surface.  Throughout my childhood, we went to visit her and my grandfather at their tiny house on the west side every Sunday evening.  My siblings and I crowded each other on the couches and chairs around their living room while my parents struggled to make small talk with them over the sounds of voices and the green flickering lights of their colored TV.

When we were lucky, we were allowed to go into the small kitchen adjoining the small living room and play with the two or three toys she had saved for amusing her grandchildren.  She would get the toy down, put it on the table, and leave the room.

I cannot recall my grandmother ever saying one single word directly to me.

I remember feeling strange at the viewing prior to her funeral.  Hers was the first lifeless body I had viewed.  I felt unsure of what to do and how to behave and watched others for clues as we stood and sat around.  I felt strange because it was new to me, and because I knew that it was a solemn occasion, that something had been forever altered in my universe, as, indeed, it had.  We continued to faithfully visit my grandfather every week, sitting around in his dim, green living room, as my mother and dad struggled more than ever to keep up small talk with a most taciturn man.  I also felt strange because I knew I should be sadder than I was.

I have two recollections from her funeral.  The first was the sound of my aunts weeping during the talks.  They felt sad.  Of course, this was their mother, I reasoned.  I would be devastated, lost, beyond crushed if my mother ever died.  It was something I had gravely pondered throughout my young life and still could not begin to comprehend the depths of sorrow I would feel at the loss of her.

The other thing I recall is something that was said about my grandmother.  Someone remarked that she was a woman who, without fail, got up and got dressed each day.  Indeed, I had never seen her not wearing a dress and nylon stockings, even at the annual fourth of July parties in her back yard.  Still, it seemed a curious thing for someone to say--a strange sort of legacy to be known for--and my mind has returned to that comment many times. 

My grandmother had lived to the age of seventy-two.  As shocked as I was at her sudden death, I realized that she had lived as long as many people in that day could expect to live.  At six times my own age, she seemed old enough, at the time, to die.  Her children had all long since married, had all completed their own families.  Her life had settled, it seemed to me, into the simple rhythms of a daily life unchallenged with important work.

My other grandmother had only lived to forty-seven.  She had died decades before my birth, leaving my mother a bereaved small child, the youngest of eight unmarried children.  In contrast, her death seemed to me to be the greatest tragedy I had ever heard of.  As she lay wasting away in bed during the last months of her life, I am sure it was painfully clear to her and her family that she was, against her will, leaving her great work unfinished.  I do not doubt that her heart yearned to take care of her children as much as her children's hearts yearned toward her.  But it was not to be.

I have heard stories about this grandmother I never knew--how she had the best garden in her neighborhood, how her children were known for their kindness to each other, how she forged a loving and strong bond with her husband and they were never known to quarrel.  I learned that she was one of the first women in her ward to drive and would give others rides to women's meetings.  I know she was tall and capable and quiet.  I know she sewed her own clothing, put up her own food, made do and did without what was beyond her means to create.  From the characteristics I got to know in my aunts, uncles, and mother, I glimpsed her fine qualities.  In the goodness of my siblings and cousins--all the grandchildren she never met--I see her legacy.

The grandmother I knew had a pastime of crocheting.  She made doilies and various other objects as she sat in her tidy house with my taciturn grandfather.  After her death, I was the recipient of a couple of these.  She once made me a pillowcase with my name on it.  With fabric paint pens, she had drawn a lamb on the white broadcloth and written my name in cursive on the pillow case's edge.

To my recollection, that is the only present I received from her in her lifetime, and the only time she had ever spelled my name right.  My birthday cards had invariably come addressed to "Jeannine."

"Why don't we tell Grandma how to spell my name?" I asked my mother once.  My ever diplomatic mother's soft response had left my grandmother exonerated of both ignorance of my name and willful bad intentions, yet failed to explain to me the mystery of the distance between us.

My education, my reading, my associations, all the stories I seek out to increase my learning and understanding inform me of the great acts of people.  I am inspired by the great things done by myriads who left something important behind them as they left this life.  I wonder sometimes if they meant to do something great, if it was hard for them, if they knew that was their calling in life, what sacrifices they made to accomplish what they did, whether greatness ever came from just pursuing the things they loved to do.

I remember many times as a child feeling like, "Here we all are, but what now are we supposed to do?"

The thought of leaving my life without doing anything important haunts me, yet I find my days are often filled to the brim with the mundane--washing the same table, sorting the same clothes into the same piles of laundry, tucking the same few children into beds with the same tired lullaby that was sung to me.  And, with that, another day is gone.

The needs of life press on us, daily.  We have to spend our days preparing food again, going to work again, getting dressed, getting undressed, even many times having the same conversations over and over again.  We have to do these things in order to survive and maintain a certain quality of life.

The opportunities to make something greater out of our lives than just surviving all our 26,300 days sometimes seem fleeting.  Frankly, we lose some of them by hesitating to step up, by failing to lift our eyes above our own kneading and mending.

But, could it be that there could be meaning, even great meaning, in doing our repetitive daily tasks?  Surely there is something to be said in what is forged by attending church every week, reading the same scriptures yet again, folding the same clothes into our children's drawers.  We know that thinking the same thoughts makes our neural pathways to that information stronger, and that the road in the brain to a detail not searched for in many years can disappear.

She got up and got dressed every day.

As little as I know about my grandmother even though I met her on at least seven hundred occasions, I know that she lived her quiet life honorably, doing what that life called upon her to do. And, I have heard since, she had some constraints on her not of her choosing that limited her choices.

Is it possible that doing the same mundane things our lives call upon us to do could be sanding grooves into some great work of art?  Could they be weaving threads into a piece of a tapestry larger than our world and with a greater design than we can comprehend?  Are all these little tasks really meaningless?  Surely, at least, good habits form a good character, and that is worth something.

And yet, how much richer would my life be if my grandmother had, just once, spoken my name, looked into my face, asked me what I thought about. . .anything?  And taught me something about herself?

That is what I finally grieve about her death.