Too many deaths in the family
Not long ago when I thought I would be blogging about my one year anniversary being married to Steve, I found I was writing about the loss of our beloved cat Pogo due to cancer. Now now long after I'm writing about the loss of my grandparents. It's just too many deaths.
My grandmother actually passed away in March of 2010 at 85. My grandfather lived untl this morning August 17, 2010 and the age of 95. To think of someone's perspective being born in 1914 and seeing what has happened today in 2010 is pretty amazing. My grandmother was ailing from a number of things and in the end she died of a blood clot in her intestines. She had been ill for a while, was very frail, beat cancer in one eye and wasn't very mobile in the last few years of her life. She had the aid of a very nice live in nurse for the last two years (Ruth) who was from Lithuania and was very loving and patient with both my grandparents.
I can't really sum up my grandmother's life in a post, she was one of those extremely loving and giving women who did it all to take care of family and we heard more about her amazing life at the memorial service they had in July. Not only did she take care of me (alternating days with my aunt phyllis for 3 months) when I was 2 and my mom was having a difficult pregnancy. She also did the same kind of thing lending a hand with so many people's children and working as a nurse. Her mother died when she was 14 and her sister Adeline and her both took care of her and subsequently went into nursing. the amazing thing about how much she cared for everyone was that my grandmother Claire was a grandmother by marriage since my biological (maternal) grandmother passed away in 1969, way before I was born. Claire loved everyone as if they were her children and she didn't let the amount of time she spent at work make choices for her about how she cared for family. I will always remember he making blueberry sauce for ice cream and sitting on the swing in front of their house with my grandpa. They were so happy there.
My grandfather didn't have the money to pay Ruth to stay at the house ($120 per day) so she left to take another job a few days after my grandmother passed away. My grandfather Ray (Roman) was a spitfire kind of guy and he was determined that he would live in his house alone, because he always lived there. My uncle Roger ended up spending the time taking daily trips to check on him, making him dinner and changing the bladder bag he had because his bladder was worn out and didn't collapse back in anymore because of a prostate cancer issue that led it to be distended for too long. Thiswas trying on my uncle's nerves, but it didn't last long because in July, a few days before my Grandmother's memorial service, my grandfather was bored and he went out in the garden, fell, and broke his hip. He said he was taking a faucet off a sink, nobody knows what sink or where this was. Its just too weird, but yet typical for my grandpa.
This landed him in the hospital for surgery. They mended the hip, but his spirit was broken. They discovered that his esophagus wasn't able to swallow, and was sealing shut. We don't know why, and they fed him intravenously, I assume because they couldn't open it up. Then he got pnemonia, but after a lot of antibiotics, he seemed to bounce back and was up in bed reading the newspaper, which made him happy for a few days. The hip didn't mend though and they never got him up to walk again. And something happened and he kept slipping back into sleep a lot and not doing well. I'm not sure why things went down hill but my Uncle convinced him that it was time and he agreed that his tubes would be disconnected and they sent him to a hospice. He lived there for about a week until this morning when he passed away. They kept talking to him about being reunited with his first wife Emily in heaven, but I'm not sure any of that is possible, while it must be somewhat comforting to think about.
I think its also conflicting to think about my grandfather's legacy and the family. Being one of 8 kids growing up durring the depression, there was always a deep seeded competition and at many times hatred between siblings. Disownment between family members was common and there were decades between the times that certain members talked. My grandfather also dis-owned his son Dan at some point when Dan went off to college because he was in too many disagreements with him and he was marrying a girl/family my grandfather didn't like. (My uncle Dan ended up very happy with my Aunt Joyce and they're still married today) We were estranged from him also for a period of about 7 years and things were so tense before that point that we worried about having both grandfathers at the house visiting at the same time because they didn't get along either. (management guy vs union guy dislike) he also kicked Roger out of the house when he was 16 after Emily died, in order to move on in his life and marry Claire as well as avoid more clashing which seemed to happen with all his kids as teenagers. It seemed like someone was always feuding in the family, and even though it never got to a violent point, the intensity of the words said was always very harsh.
So in retrospect its a mixed memory. My grandfather Ray also did great things, and this is where it gets confusing to me, because I could never be open and social with people who I knew didn't really like me or my family even years after the issue had passed. I always felt that if they did or said something really hurtful/rude/un-called-for, that it would happen again and there was this underlying dislike there, so why get involved? I guess I never learned to forgive and forget, but I still can't really. In contrast to the family issues Ray worked nights as a pipe fitter (plumber for cooling systems) at Taylor Forge. I don't know more than that except that he liked working nights because he didn't have to deal with people and there was a bonus for working at night. He also was always active doing projects on his house in Berwyn. He took a bungalow house and made it into a raised roof two story in the 1950's. Yes to today's standards it is still a bit 50's but in its day he doubled the square footage of the house, added a breezeway with a waterfall to the garage (don't ask that is because I can't really explain it) and generally did all the maintenance on it himself. He plastered the walls with the thickest coat of plaster, ever, re-roofed it and kept it up and running until a few years ago. He had been on the roof in his 90's, which wasn't adviseable. When the building/expanding was happening my mom says he would buy things as they had money for them, and do things like the driveway in sections slowly filling in more sections as the months went on. He would get glass panels and materials from salvage places and repurpose them into huge windows and other places in the house.
You've never seen a house built like this yet with little whimsical touches, like the little colored lights behind a gingerbread molding around the edge of a dome in the ceiling of the kitchen. Or the waterfall in the breezeway with the koi fish in the pond in the bottom. He also had a 2 tiered waterfall basin where the fish lived outside in the summer (in the 80's) but he had to stop that because the neighborhood kids would steal and kill the fish. He also built in these display coves in the walls of the living room and dining room and built storage into the sofet/walls above the china cabinets in the dining room. It was lime green, but he had cateracts at the time so he thought it was a lot lighter. There was a theme/color to each room and it was whimsical. He retrofitted a modern TV into an old TV cabinet from the 70's because he liked it that way. He made everything from the car-port to the fence out of corigated green fiberglass. He named the house Rosebud Ranch, after my grandmother's middle name. he loved Ginko trees and had one with the smelly seeds, and planted them all over the lawn in later years (some seeded themselves). He also grew a pear tree and fought the squirrels to actually get some of the pears. My cat Missy was born at that house, in the fern patch and then carried across busy east avenue by her mother to my Uncle's house (at that time, was across the street) where my uncle and aunt were feeding the mother cat. There are so many memories of the house and the way it transcends time and people. Now it has to be sold and needs a ton of work from the neglect in the last few years and the general out-datedness that would mean only someone who was from retrorenovations.com would want to buy it.
I guess I don't know how to summarize things about my Grandparents. They didn't know what I did for a living and haven't understood much about my life in a long long time, and I didn't understand theirs either. They weren't particularly close to me as a result and we didn't really have much of a relationship after the disownment of 1984. Yet I still liked knowing there was a family there. The history was still there and potentially could be researched and talked about if neccissary. Now its gone. I also still feel that the biggest issue I have with death is the unfairness of taking a life away once it has been given. Yes I know this is how nature works and we all live on through genetics and the process of nature's renewal. Yet for someone to get the gift of life and then have to give it up, either knowingly or unknowingly is the cruelest thing ever. Whether there is an afterlife or not. I'm not spiritual so I guess I have a harder time with this just having my logic and experiences to go on, but its seems ultimately just too sad.
