Grandma's Notebook
So, maybe not being selected for the new job had me in a funk, but I like to think of it more as contemplating what I want my next step to be. And it got me to thinking about my grandmother.
My grandmother, for about the past 10 years or so, has kept a notepad by her chair in the living room. This by itself probably wouldn't be all that odd except that this is not your normal "get eggs, call bitty" type notebook. She has been writing her own obituary for the past 10 years.
Now, writing that is a totally morbid thought, and seeing it used to upset me a lot. But when I lived there taking care of my grandfather I sat down to read it one day. And I figured out that it wasn't quite as morbid (or conceited) as I had expected. It was almost like a little mini memoir about who my Grams has been and the people and things she was glad to have encountered in her life. I guess when you think about it, when you get to be 84 it has to be kind of nice to look back at that as time well spent.
Grams has led a really interesting life. She grew up on a farm that has been in our family since the 1830s. Her grandfather had deserted the union army and run off to Canada, where he bought a farmstead that just happened to have a vast quantity of oil underneath it. At some point post-war he came back and was elected to a seat in the local government, a post which something to the tune of 130 years later my mother would occupy. Her father was halfway between territorial and crazy. He removed squatters from the farmstead on more than one occasion by simply burning down the houses. She had 8 siblings, one of which drown on the lake I grew up on and one that lived in a one room shack in the woods with no amenities until he died when I was 4 years old.
When she married my grandfather the two of them went out to celebrate and forgot their marriage license at the restaurant. A fellow serviceman tracked down my grandfather and returned it to them later that night. At this point my grandfather was stationed in Alabama and she had moved there to live with him. She spent the period around WW2 "living in a boarding house for [X small amount of money] and sharing a bathroom with 5 other women"- a fact she never fails to bring up every time I send her pictures of a new apartment and she decides I have far too many belongings and don't need all the space... or private facilities for my expansive collection of bathroom stuff. Post war she and my grandfather moved back to Minnesota and started having kids. My grandmother had a string of jobs that I would have to look back on to be able to sort out, but a lot of time was spent working in terminal care and hospice care- which is what she did when I was a child and probably why I got so into it, going with her. A lot of her patients left me things in their wills, mostly statuettes and things of that nature, but I guess there is a lot of stuff she has in a box for me that I'm not allowed to look at until she dies. Another one of her odd fascinations with that particular event.
She isn't what I'd call super religious, at least not compared to a lot of other members of my family. She is really spiritual and is an uber christian, but not in that weird crusade way. She has always done a lot of work in her church and done gross amounts of mission work. Any of the people that went to elementary school probably remember the years between 3-6th grade where when we cleaned our desks out at the end of the year we weren't allowed to throw anything away- it all went in big boxes. Well, that was my grandmother's doing, and we got so much stuff in those years that she built a separate building to hold and process all of it. I remember every summer coming off of field work and sitting with her at night sorting that stuff into individual, hand sewn school bags. She traveled all over the world taking that junk with her, and then finding places to send it after she'd been there. I have stuff she has given me from all over the world: a crane carved from a single piece of buffalo horn from Africa, a carved antelope from India, and a lot of stuff from the months she spent in Jamaica building schools. The 75 year old lady, building a school.
She's had breast cancer and a double mastectomy, lead canoe trips through the boundary waters, planted a 3 acre parcel of pine trees on our property, helped me raise sheep and until her body finally started to object in the form of arthritis, she grew her own grain and milled it into her own flour for all her baking. She recently had a 3 sided shelter placed in the woods of my old sheep pasture where she goes to sleep during the summer.
Oh, and she is a crack shot who shoots bears when they get too close to the house. She taught me how to use the gun I carried in the woods from about 12 or so on.
And that is just the stuff I can remember.
So I guess when you think about it, its the sort of a life I'd want to try to have people remember when I die, instead of being all sad that I finally kicked it. And since she also has her own funeral planned, paid for and orchestrated, she isn't allowing any sappy music to be played. It's all peppy "Lord of the Dance" type stuff.
I guess where I was going got really off track. But what I'm thinking is that not a lot of people get the chance to write their own obituary. Its not something I plan to do, although I do share her anal attentive attention to detail and have my own... lets call it, "post-expiration care" planned and taken care of. They are gonna char me to a crisp, grind me up and one of you poor saps is going to toss me in a national park somewhere. At some form of memorial you'll all be forced to eat cheese curds and be subjected to a sing-along version of The Pogues "Fairytale of New York" while doing shots of whiskey. I'm hardcore.
Anywhoooo. The point-
If you were to write your own obituary, what would you say? And is it what you WANT it to say, or does it make you want to do something new? Are you going to keep putting it off "until"? Me may have great intentions, but instead of acting on them, we put them off "until". Until you have a house, until you have the kids, until you save for retirement? Eventually we run out of "untils".
One of the passengers on United Flight 93 called his wife from the hijacked plane. He said "I know we're going to die, but some of us are going to do something". When you think about it, "I know we're going to die" is a wholly unremarkable statement. All of us can say the same thing. The next words are the ones that are not only matter of fact, but electrifying: "some of us are going to do something". Those words convey the fundamental challenge put forth to us by life. We are all mortal, and what defines us is how we use the time and opportunities we have.
So, would your obituary say what you wanted? Or would the notebook by your easy chair not have the content you really want?
My grandmother, for about the past 10 years or so, has kept a notepad by her chair in the living room. This by itself probably wouldn't be all that odd except that this is not your normal "get eggs, call bitty" type notebook. She has been writing her own obituary for the past 10 years.
Now, writing that is a totally morbid thought, and seeing it used to upset me a lot. But when I lived there taking care of my grandfather I sat down to read it one day. And I figured out that it wasn't quite as morbid (or conceited) as I had expected. It was almost like a little mini memoir about who my Grams has been and the people and things she was glad to have encountered in her life. I guess when you think about it, when you get to be 84 it has to be kind of nice to look back at that as time well spent.
Grams has led a really interesting life. She grew up on a farm that has been in our family since the 1830s. Her grandfather had deserted the union army and run off to Canada, where he bought a farmstead that just happened to have a vast quantity of oil underneath it. At some point post-war he came back and was elected to a seat in the local government, a post which something to the tune of 130 years later my mother would occupy. Her father was halfway between territorial and crazy. He removed squatters from the farmstead on more than one occasion by simply burning down the houses. She had 8 siblings, one of which drown on the lake I grew up on and one that lived in a one room shack in the woods with no amenities until he died when I was 4 years old.
When she married my grandfather the two of them went out to celebrate and forgot their marriage license at the restaurant. A fellow serviceman tracked down my grandfather and returned it to them later that night. At this point my grandfather was stationed in Alabama and she had moved there to live with him. She spent the period around WW2 "living in a boarding house for [X small amount of money] and sharing a bathroom with 5 other women"- a fact she never fails to bring up every time I send her pictures of a new apartment and she decides I have far too many belongings and don't need all the space... or private facilities for my expansive collection of bathroom stuff. Post war she and my grandfather moved back to Minnesota and started having kids. My grandmother had a string of jobs that I would have to look back on to be able to sort out, but a lot of time was spent working in terminal care and hospice care- which is what she did when I was a child and probably why I got so into it, going with her. A lot of her patients left me things in their wills, mostly statuettes and things of that nature, but I guess there is a lot of stuff she has in a box for me that I'm not allowed to look at until she dies. Another one of her odd fascinations with that particular event.
She isn't what I'd call super religious, at least not compared to a lot of other members of my family. She is really spiritual and is an uber christian, but not in that weird crusade way. She has always done a lot of work in her church and done gross amounts of mission work. Any of the people that went to elementary school probably remember the years between 3-6th grade where when we cleaned our desks out at the end of the year we weren't allowed to throw anything away- it all went in big boxes. Well, that was my grandmother's doing, and we got so much stuff in those years that she built a separate building to hold and process all of it. I remember every summer coming off of field work and sitting with her at night sorting that stuff into individual, hand sewn school bags. She traveled all over the world taking that junk with her, and then finding places to send it after she'd been there. I have stuff she has given me from all over the world: a crane carved from a single piece of buffalo horn from Africa, a carved antelope from India, and a lot of stuff from the months she spent in Jamaica building schools. The 75 year old lady, building a school.
She's had breast cancer and a double mastectomy, lead canoe trips through the boundary waters, planted a 3 acre parcel of pine trees on our property, helped me raise sheep and until her body finally started to object in the form of arthritis, she grew her own grain and milled it into her own flour for all her baking. She recently had a 3 sided shelter placed in the woods of my old sheep pasture where she goes to sleep during the summer.
Oh, and she is a crack shot who shoots bears when they get too close to the house. She taught me how to use the gun I carried in the woods from about 12 or so on.
And that is just the stuff I can remember.
So I guess when you think about it, its the sort of a life I'd want to try to have people remember when I die, instead of being all sad that I finally kicked it. And since she also has her own funeral planned, paid for and orchestrated, she isn't allowing any sappy music to be played. It's all peppy "Lord of the Dance" type stuff.
I guess where I was going got really off track. But what I'm thinking is that not a lot of people get the chance to write their own obituary. Its not something I plan to do, although I do share her anal attentive attention to detail and have my own... lets call it, "post-expiration care" planned and taken care of. They are gonna char me to a crisp, grind me up and one of you poor saps is going to toss me in a national park somewhere. At some form of memorial you'll all be forced to eat cheese curds and be subjected to a sing-along version of The Pogues "Fairytale of New York" while doing shots of whiskey. I'm hardcore.
Anywhoooo. The point-
If you were to write your own obituary, what would you say? And is it what you WANT it to say, or does it make you want to do something new? Are you going to keep putting it off "until"? Me may have great intentions, but instead of acting on them, we put them off "until". Until you have a house, until you have the kids, until you save for retirement? Eventually we run out of "untils".
One of the passengers on United Flight 93 called his wife from the hijacked plane. He said "I know we're going to die, but some of us are going to do something". When you think about it, "I know we're going to die" is a wholly unremarkable statement. All of us can say the same thing. The next words are the ones that are not only matter of fact, but electrifying: "some of us are going to do something". Those words convey the fundamental challenge put forth to us by life. We are all mortal, and what defines us is how we use the time and opportunities we have.
So, would your obituary say what you wanted? Or would the notebook by your easy chair not have the content you really want?