Merry Christmas!
Coming soon, look for old friends returning and interactive fun on MacPhoenix!
Marjorie
My grandmother passed away Monday, October 19th. The previous year, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and she was determined to fight it as long as she could. I admire her strength—she remained positive and active until about 3 weeks before her death. The agressive treatments gave her another year of life, a year of joys and successes that she could share with her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. I am very thankful for that extra year. I am thankful, too, for the almost-40 years that I was in her life. It isn’t common to have grandparents alive and well when you’re hitting middle-age. I am blessed to have had her and my other grandparents in my life for so long.
My grandmother was a loving friend to anyone she met. She was an endearing, dignified, and generous woman. She was kind and bright and curious. These are traits that were obvious to all who knew her. I’m not inflating the image of my departed grandmother. It is no stretch to say she was a remarkable, wonderful person.
My grandmother always expressed how special I was to her. This isn’t uncommon for grandchildren to hear, of course. But I know there was something deep and unspoken about our bond. Sometimes, I think about that bond in terms of how she helped my mother raise me when my mom had to work fulltime, when my grandmother would watch me on the weekends. Sometimes, I think about being the first grandchild in the family, and the only grandchild for several years. These were things beyond our control, though—what life threw at our family—the luck of the draw, as far as it goes. But now, after her death, and when I reflect on what she has meant to me and what she has given to me, I think what we shared was our curiosity.
There was never a subject that my grandmother didn’t find interesting. There was never an anecdote or factoid or newspaper article that my grandmother didn’t take some context from and put it in to the larger picture of her worldview. She loved history and geography and science and civics, not because it would further her career—a fulltime mother of five, plus one precocious grandchild—but because the learning itself was interesting, and she never tired of it. Her family history stretched far into the American past, so that when she learned about history and geography, she was also learning about her past and her family. She taught those stories to me, and I think it pleased her to see how enriched I was by them. Her past was my past, and I took pride in knowing it. I respected what came before, but I was also at the right time to learn the tools that would allow me to share an obituary with a couple-of-hundred friends instantly on a social-networking site. My grandmother was the guide to my past. I was her guide to the future.
Every moment we shared together was a moment we learned together. I think that gave her great joy. It will always give me the greatest joy.
My grandmother’s love is timeless, something that her death will never diminish. And I will bring that love and caring with me to share for all my time left. I am so glad that I was lucky enough to be my grandmother’s grandson. She will be missed, but never forgotten, and always loved.