samsara
You may remember a dream I posted almost a month ago about a visit to see my 97-year-old paternal grandmother with dementia, and the discovery in her home of a long-lost son named Jed. Well, I found out today that my grandmother died this Monday. She'd been in hospice care for a few months after breaking her leg, so it wasn't that much of a surprise; plus 97 years is quite a long time. This is only the third time any member of my family has died during my lifetime: an uncle in his 60s succumbed to a brain tumor last year, and my maternal grandfather passed on when I was about five.
I never knew my grandmother very well. I remember that, even as a child, it bothered me that I'd never seen any pictures of her as a young woman, so my only concept of her was as hunched-over, wrinkled, and above all Old. (I remember telling her, at age 11, that I'd gone to Nickelodeon Studios on a Florida vacation, and her response was, "Didja see one?"--referring to the very early term for movie theatres, when you paid a nickel to get in.)
I know she, along with my maternal grandmother, was a fiercely stubborn, independent woman, descended from German immigrants, who was devoted to the church and the Republican party. While I may not share her religious and political convictions, I may have inherited my stubbornness from her. With declining vision, she still clung to her driver's license past age 90, diligently driving to church each Sunday until the night she arrived on Saturday instead, banging on the church doors demanding to be let in and causing such a ruckus that the police were called, whom she then led in a 90 mph car chase because she'd forgotten she had to pull over. She'd lived in the same farmhouse in southern Missouri for several decades, into her early 90s (and alone the last few years), until she was finally placed in a "home" after being sent to the ER for wearing a sweater indoors, without air conditioning, on an especially hot summer day. An avid gardener, she had to be sedated in the "home" after my parents sent her flowers, becoming upset because she thought they'd been stolen from her own garden.
She had been intelligent: one of her few stories I remember was of being skipped a grade or two in elementary school, and I found materials in her home (including a metal ink stamp with her face etched into it) referring to a political campaign in the '60s where she'd run for a local Republican position. Before her death, she hadn't recognized her own children in about five years, only knowing her eldest daughter as "someone she liked", muttering nonsense phrases to herself and near the end, not seeming fully aware of others in the room (according to my mother).
On another note, someone randomly sent me this IM today:
ilyaXzZQ59 (7:29:11 PM): wow you are NOT kidding
I didn't respond, and I don't know what the hell this means. I don't know who this person is, if this was meant as insulting or complimentary or even what it referred back to in the first place--or if it's some particularly ineffective form of IM spam. A random thought, but it annoys me not to know.
I never knew my grandmother very well. I remember that, even as a child, it bothered me that I'd never seen any pictures of her as a young woman, so my only concept of her was as hunched-over, wrinkled, and above all Old. (I remember telling her, at age 11, that I'd gone to Nickelodeon Studios on a Florida vacation, and her response was, "Didja see one?"--referring to the very early term for movie theatres, when you paid a nickel to get in.)
I know she, along with my maternal grandmother, was a fiercely stubborn, independent woman, descended from German immigrants, who was devoted to the church and the Republican party. While I may not share her religious and political convictions, I may have inherited my stubbornness from her. With declining vision, she still clung to her driver's license past age 90, diligently driving to church each Sunday until the night she arrived on Saturday instead, banging on the church doors demanding to be let in and causing such a ruckus that the police were called, whom she then led in a 90 mph car chase because she'd forgotten she had to pull over. She'd lived in the same farmhouse in southern Missouri for several decades, into her early 90s (and alone the last few years), until she was finally placed in a "home" after being sent to the ER for wearing a sweater indoors, without air conditioning, on an especially hot summer day. An avid gardener, she had to be sedated in the "home" after my parents sent her flowers, becoming upset because she thought they'd been stolen from her own garden.
She had been intelligent: one of her few stories I remember was of being skipped a grade or two in elementary school, and I found materials in her home (including a metal ink stamp with her face etched into it) referring to a political campaign in the '60s where she'd run for a local Republican position. Before her death, she hadn't recognized her own children in about five years, only knowing her eldest daughter as "someone she liked", muttering nonsense phrases to herself and near the end, not seeming fully aware of others in the room (according to my mother).
On another note, someone randomly sent me this IM today:
ilyaXzZQ59 (7:29:11 PM): wow you are NOT kidding
I didn't respond, and I don't know what the hell this means. I don't know who this person is, if this was meant as insulting or complimentary or even what it referred back to in the first place--or if it's some particularly ineffective form of IM spam. A random thought, but it annoys me not to know.