Last summer, I spent a week in Illinois and Missouri visiting the relatives
on my mother's side of the family. This was a routine occurrence during my
teenage years, wherein my sister and I would make yearly summertime pilgrimages
to the Midwest countryside for two-week-long visits. Now that I'm an adult with
limited vacation time and have spent the last 2 years living in Germany, I make
it out to the ol' homestead much less frequently than I would like. But I
managed to fit it in last summer and was overjoyed to have done so. Everything
was perfect and relaxed, the weather was hot but not oppressive, and we did
nothing but hang out on my aunt’s farm, swim in the pond and eat large amounts
of home cookin'. I couldn't help but feel like a child again among all the
aunts and uncles. They are there, year after year, living in the same houses
and driving the same cars, taking us out to the same buffet restaurants and
shopping at the same Wal-Mart. The scene there has remained unchanged as far
back as I can remember.
This time around, we arranged it so that my brothers and sister could visit
the same time I did, turning it into a proper sibling reunion. We’re all
grownups now and live in different cities, so this doesn’t happen very often.
We had lots of time to hang out and play with all of my cousins' kids, the
oldest of the bunch who are now entering their teenage years. That's something
that
has changed over the years: watching my little cousins morph from
baby blobs into little kiddos and now into young pre-teens that are smart and
talented and way better with technology than I am. But the rest of it remains
as unchanged as a memory. My siblings must feel it too, because they revert to
the same childlike behavior as I do, there among the backdrop of cornfields and
azure Missouri sky. We play and make silly jokes and allow ourselves to be fed
catfish and pancakes until the point of bursting. And over it all presides my
grandmother, always there, always the same. The matriarch that is always the
oldest at all the family reunions, and can still remember who is related to
whom amid the awkward potluck-y chaos, who tells the same stories year in and
year out. The stark epitome of unchanged-ness.
My grandma was born in September 1916, making her 96 years old. Her first
road trip was with her father and sisters in a Model-T across Wyoming when she
was 16. She remembers the Great Depression and World War Two. She married at
18, raised 4 children on a farm in rural Missouri, was the head cook at the
school cafeteria while my mom was in grade school. After that, she ran her own
diner in the nearest town for 11 years, baking pies every day to the endless
delight of the locals, finally deciding to close shop sometime near the end of
the Reagan administration. She has no idea what the Internet is (even though I
use it to call her every Sunday afternoon). We don't Skype, because I'm pretty
sure that would be too much for her to handle, even though it would be flipping
sweet to videochat with her via her giant flatscreen TV that her sons got her
for Christmas a few years back. No, I call her on her landline. She knows the
call is coming, too, because it takes place every Sunday, always at the same
time of day. I picture her settling down into her easy chair, maybe muting the
TV in anticipation of the phone ringing, waiting for my call.
The idea for a weekly call is new for us - previously, I only called her on
her birthday, Christmas, and Mother's Day. The onus came from my aunt during my
last visit. Most of the care that needs to happen for Grandma has fallen to my
aunt for 2 reasons: 1. because she is an absolute saint, and 2. because no one
else has been around to do it. Grandma is surprisingly self-sufficient for an
elderly woman, but even though she lives alone in her own apartment and can do
most self-care tasks independently, she is heavily dependent on my aunt in an
emotional sense. The whole system only works because they have lived next door
to each other for the last 25 years, ever since my grandfather died of a heart
attack on the farm while out raking leaves. In calling every week, even just
for a short window of time, I would be helping my aunt in the work of
entertaining Grandma. Even though it's just a tiny, tiny fraction of the work that
my aunt has done day in and day out for over 20 years, she explained how it
would really help her out if I would take time out of my schedule every week to
do it. So I agreed to it. As commitments go, it's pretty low-level: I didn't
mention that the call takes place so late my time that I don't really ever have
to cut my plans short to go home to call, and that if I do it's probably for
the best because it's a Sunday night and I shouldn't be out late anyway and
definitely not out late drinking and/or dancing, so really the weekly
appointment does a good job of keeping me out of trouble.
Grandma can't understand a lot of what I say on the phone. Her mental
capacities are largely still there, it's just that she has a hard time hearing
me. And when she can't understand something I say, it embarrasses her and
sometimes she doesn't even ask me to repeat myself before slipping into an
apologetic "I wish I could hear as well as I used to", which has the
unfailing ability to shatter my heart into pieces every time. So I change the
way I talk when I speak with her. Some of it is unintentional, like the
"g" falling off the end of every word ending in "ing":
"doin' alright, lookin' out for yourself, goin' to dinner". But I
also take care to make my sentences shorter, focusing around one main point,
creating a palatable little package that’s more digestible for my grandmother's
ears. And I stick to easy topics, asking questions she can answer. The weather.
Her blood pressure. How the family's doing. Whether she'll be attending church
that evening.
But there's other things I wish I could ask her. Heavier things.
Non-small-talk things. Things that are no longer suitable for a 96-year-old
with hearing and blood pressure issues. And there’s things that I would tell
her, too. I don't believe in a heaven, but if I did, it would be a place where
you could get the answer to anything you ever wanted to know from anyone who
ever existed. A fountain of knowledge from which you could drink again and
again for the rest of eternity. And in this heaven, I would of course interview
Einstein and JFK and Stalin and Amelia Earhart and various other historical
figures, and find out all the answers to all the mysteries and conspiracies of
our time and the times before us. But I would also want to sit down for a good
long time with my grandma, a version of her unimpaired by physical limitations
and ghosts of the past. And in this heaven, we would have a lot to talk about.
I would tell her that I’m glad for the simple fact that she exists on this
planet, that she chose to make a life on the farm and tame the land so that her
offspring could have a good childhood. That it’s only through her choice to
reproduce that I’ve been given the miraculous gift of life (of course, there
were many other people involved in that series of events as well – I would
interview them too in this version of heaven, naturally).
I would tell her that despite all my feminist beliefs and liberal leanings,
despite all the opportunities I have been handed in my life, there are still
moments when I wish I'd had her childhood. There's something firm and solid
about being raised on a farm with your four sisters, all learning together how
to cook and sew and quilt, knowing you were expected to find a nice young man
to settle down with by the end of your teenage years. I'd ask her if knowing
her fate from the time she was a little girl made her feel trapped, or if it
offered a much-welcomed sense of security.
I would say I don't ever want to know how it is to have your youngest child
pass away before you do, to have any of your children die for that matter, and
how she mustn't blame herself, she didn't know the medication might have those
side effects if you took it during pregnancy. No one knew, not even the
doctors. How she must be the bravest person I know for living through it. That
it could have been much worse, that Mom easily could have passed away decades
before she actually did.
I would say that she shouldn't resent the loss of her youthful beauty, that
it's an absolutely astounding feat to make it to your tenth decade of life and
that she should be proud to be 96 and should be owning it, when inside I know
that I will probably feel that way too if I ever live to be that old because
I'm already mourning the loss of my youth at age 28.
I would ask her what it’s like to lose all the people you knew, to have all
your siblings precede you in death, and whether that made her value her days
all the more or just served to make her relive her past over and over in her head
and wonder what the sense of it all is.
I would confess to her that part of me wishes she would have moved to New
York after retiring to spend her pension on a small Manhattan studio apartment
and delightfully elaborate hats to wear to the corner café for her morning
coffee, because that is what I would want for myself if had to spend 25 years
as an old single woman. That her choice to stay in the Midwest and do nothing
for a quarter century stems from asking herself “Why would I do that?” instead of
asking “Why wouldn’t I do that?”. I should know. It’s a mistake I make all the
time.
I would ask her if she’d ever thought of the events of her life as conscious
choices, or just considered everything to have turned out the way it was meant
to turn out, because that’s the way things were back then. Maybe she's thankful
that she didn't suffer from an overwhelming tide of choice bearing down on her,
or maybe she would have wanted more freedom to choose.
I would urge her to show her love for her children and grandchildren,
instead of judging them for the choices that they’ve made and the people
they’ve turned out to be, the people they always were. To practice acceptance
and to demonstrate it daily. To set an example for the rest of us: her 4
children, 8 grandchildren, and 9 great-grandchildren.
These are the things I would like to know. But like I said, I don’t believe
in heaven. Which incidentally makes it all the more pressing that I cherish
every moment during those Sunday calls as I listen to my grandmother’s gravelly
voice falling quietly out of my laptop speakers. And to make it a priority to
go see her again soon. To fly to the Midwest to take up a spot next to her on
her ancient couch, to nestle my arm under hers and just talk about any old thing,
is as close to my imaginary heaven as we may ever get. And when I run out of
things to say, to just listen. And when there’s no more words left, to just sit
there and be still, and enjoy our little version of heaven on earth together in
comfortable silence.
*UPDATE*
Frankie Turner passed away at age 96 on April 11th, 2013 at 10:30pm CST. A copy of this post was printed and placed in her casket.
Her obituary can be found
here.
Rest in peace, Grandma. I hope you found your way to the heaven you believed in.
