Granny

Granny was 96 years old, losing her mind and her body for the last few and yet still there are people all over, friends and family alike mourning her loss like she was secretly their best friend.  There’s a magnitude in that.  She hasn’t even really been present for most of us in years.  How many of us will ever be that missed?  - That important?

But she was magic.  Granny knew what you were feeling even when no one else in the room knew or cared.  She spoke when she knew it was valuable and she listened when no one else would because Granny had a secret. 

Granny was love.  Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

She was smart and powerful at the very same time as being weak and overwhelmed.  She was selfless, because she loved herself. She knew God, and when she chose you to love and focus on, you felt it.  When she’d attend to you to protect or nurture, to comfort, to listen or to laugh with - when Granny gave you her attention, that was everything.  Her friend Fred used to call her the “Boss” which she hated but it was an arcane remark on the quiet power people would trip over themselves just to accommodate. 

The last clear words I feel like I really heard from her were a boisterous and relieved “Oh hey Doll…”.  For a moment it felt like we were finding each other again like a couple good old friends who’d just lost touch for a little while.  

But there are never the words for this.  Each loss compounds the others and is unique, and painful, revealing and exquisitely beautiful.  Really, each moment is (beautiful) if you live like this smart lady tried to.  

So many people in life love her even if most of them are people we can’t see.  There are her people: her mom and her dad, both brothers, Pop-pops, Aunt Elsie, both Uncle Franks, her cousin, Norman, Aunt Gert and Uncle Ed, Aunt Helen and Chris. Her friends: Mary Jane and Charlie, Fred, Uncle Al, and the old gang.  Everyone who spent time with her, Mrs. Lauth, Beth, Gladys, my other grandma, Rosa, of course my mom and my dad and Maureen, Aunt Margie, Uncle Dany.

The people who populate your childhood kind of erode into the background of your mind.  We are all the good guys in some stories and the bad in others.  Funny thing is, it doesn’t really matter.  They’re just stories.   It’s the people that matter.  The connections are what it’s really all about.  And that’s the secret Granny always knew.