The last of my living ancestors have passed.
I received word today that my maternal grandmother left us. It was not a surprise, she was frail ninety-three year old. It's sobering to consider that my parents are now the eldest generation of my family.
I was a bit nervous talking to my mother because her relationship with her mother has long been problematic, to say the least. My grandmother was not an easy woman to grow up with. I don't know what was going on with her family, but they seem to have been quite troubled. And my grandmother struggled with alcoholism. She stayed sober when I was a kid, but my grandfather's death devastated her control.
I learned Mom had been talking with her sister and (I gather) processing a bit. My grandmother seems to have always been a bit of a mystery to her grown children. There was plenty of evidence that my grandmother had been a vital, intense interesting woman, but not to her children. Domesticity seemed to bring out the intensity in a hard way and didn't bring her much happiness.
The two of them came to a conclusion something the lines of, "Isn't it funny that someone who had such an interesting life before and after children, didn't actually share any of that WITH her children." Which I thought was unusually insightful. Maybe my mother and her sister can find some peace around their troubled family stuff.
I guess in summation, I feel a bit sobered, but not sad. In a lot of ways, the woman I remember clearly who loved to garden and swim and worked as a waitress and traveled with her husband in a microbus (!) has been gone for awhile. She's been very frail and "out of it" for a few years. But I remember her as she was years ago, in a swim cap and a gaudy old lady bathing suit, gently splashing childhood me's knees with water and laughing, laughing in the sun.
I was a bit nervous talking to my mother because her relationship with her mother has long been problematic, to say the least. My grandmother was not an easy woman to grow up with. I don't know what was going on with her family, but they seem to have been quite troubled. And my grandmother struggled with alcoholism. She stayed sober when I was a kid, but my grandfather's death devastated her control.
I learned Mom had been talking with her sister and (I gather) processing a bit. My grandmother seems to have always been a bit of a mystery to her grown children. There was plenty of evidence that my grandmother had been a vital, intense interesting woman, but not to her children. Domesticity seemed to bring out the intensity in a hard way and didn't bring her much happiness.
The two of them came to a conclusion something the lines of, "Isn't it funny that someone who had such an interesting life before and after children, didn't actually share any of that WITH her children." Which I thought was unusually insightful. Maybe my mother and her sister can find some peace around their troubled family stuff.
I guess in summation, I feel a bit sobered, but not sad. In a lot of ways, the woman I remember clearly who loved to garden and swim and worked as a waitress and traveled with her husband in a microbus (!) has been gone for awhile. She's been very frail and "out of it" for a few years. But I remember her as she was years ago, in a swim cap and a gaudy old lady bathing suit, gently splashing childhood me's knees with water and laughing, laughing in the sun.