... had a hell of a dramatic streak. Imagine that, my grandmother, dramatic. What’s that old saying about the apple not falling far from the tree? It will be three years this Saturday since she died. She read somewhere once that when an old person dies, a library is burned. Their stories go with them. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to save a bit of her library here.
My Grammies was a study in contrasts. She was funny and feisty and fearless. She was as quick to laugh as she was to bitch. She always, always thought girls had to be tough… tougher than boys. She felt the world was always harder on women. She was a force of nature, always doing... sewing her own clothes, making her own soap. There were always sheets drying on the line and something simmering on the stove. She was constant motion and irritation and unexpected laughter. To me, she was my center, my peace, my home.
Some of my younger cousins didn't have the same grandmother I did. She was a different person with them. Harder, dare I say at times mean. I'm sorry like you can't imagine for those younger cousins, because my grammies was a hoot. My grandma was a smoocher. Kiss and hug before leaving. Always say ‘love you’ when saying good-bye. Just in case you didn't get a chance to say it again. Even when she was pissed at you...even when she was hanging up on you, she managed the love you. She used to tell me when I was little to save the big kisses for her. In my little girl head, I imagined kisses shaped like gum wrappers (who the hell knows why). The Juicy Fruit sized wrappers were all for Grandma... the Dentyne sized were for everyone else.
She had a serious trash mouth. There's that apple and tree thing again. She's the first place I heard the 'f' word. She did not discriminate and would swear at anyone or anything within earshot. Cats in particular were on the receiving end. So were the mailman and Republicans. I heard my fair share of "Damn it Leasie", usually immediately followed by 'well, honey, what were you thinking?!" Grandma was also fond of the middle finger. She used it frequently and with vigor.
I always thought my grandma was a lousy cook. My mother is a ridiculously good cook as is my Auntie Ruby, so I'm not quite sure how that happened. Grandma was good at homemade mac and cheese. You could actually feel it clogging your arteries. And the woman could fry a chicken. Of course, I couldn't eat it, because I had the visual of her removing said chicken's head burned into my memory. But if she could screw up a recipe, she would and with gusto. She'd forget the salt or the sugar or some other main ingredient. Once, when I was in second grade, she made pumpkin pie so heinous that my friend Julie M. couldn't eat pumpkin pie again until she was an adult. I still can't. But Grandma tried; she could make a meal out of nothing, because she had to when she was young.
She wasted nothing. Our grandparents were the original recyclers, you realize. She'd wash out a Ziploc bag and reuse it until the zipper stopped working. One year we decided to use disposable plastic plates for a holiday dinner. After dinner, she made us dig them out of the trash and wash them. We could use them again next year, you know. She saved drinking straws and pill bottles. She always knew the exact right size of bowl needed for leftovers. It was a gift. Auntie Ruby has it too. No sense in wasting space in the fridge with too big a damn bowl.
Grandma had all these crazy saying and home remedies. Shoes upside down under a bed cured foot cramps. If you put an article of clothing on wrong-side out in the morning, it had to stay that way until the sun went down. Girls shouldn’t wear underwear to bed… you needed to “let your stuff air out”. (We girl cousins still laugh about that!) Someone was "crazy as a cat in a bag". Sex before marriage caused one to have a flat rear-end (I'm evidence of that, I think!). If someone's man got out of line she'd always suggest sewing him up in a bed sheet and beating the hell out of him with a baseball bat...that would fix him. PMS was a myth created by Tylenol. If you made a child eat raisins before going to sleep, they wouldn't wet the bed. I hate raisins to this day because of that one. And baking soda and homemade lye soap were all you needed to cure whatever you had.
Grandma was perpetually sick. She was the exception to the baking soda and lye soap rule. She was ‘allergic' to everything. That's what she'd say, "I'm allergic to that and that and that..." She kept a little list in her wallet so she could remember exactly what she was allergic to. When she got older and sicker her children and I carried a copy of that long list, so we could tell the nurse paper tape only, no latex gloves.
She lived briefly in an assisted living facility. Briefly as in three months. She hated it and constantly worked her family's guilt to get her "the hell out of this place." She didn't need to be there; she had a home of her own. After she died we found a note she wrote the administrators of the facility explaining that while they were "all decent people" she simply didn't belong there. I would almost daily stop by to see her on my way home from work. And she would almost daily pout and be pissy about us "sticking me here in this hell." She'd behave if she went home. She'd hire someone to drive her and help her clean, but she needed to be in her house where her husband died. See, she was really good with the guilt. Luckily, when she did go home, we were able to hire 24-hour care for her, so she was safe and taken care of. She was pissed about these women being in her house, but it was better than the alternative.
About a month into her living at this lovely facility (she hated) where she had her own apartment ("a goddamn cracker box"), she called me at work and said she needed me to come by because there was something very important she needed me to do. I was used to this and assumed it meant moving her chair for the hundredth time or taking her to get a loaf of oat bran bread. Wrong, I was. She had devised a master scheme she believed would create the queen mother of all guilt trips for me and finally get her home. She needed my help writing her eulogy. Seriously. Gotta love the old girl’s aplomb.
She had seen something on Oprah ("That's how damn BORED I am here, Leasie, I'm watching that old Oprah!!") about a woman writing letters to her family to be read at her death. She liked that idea, but thought it would be much more impactful if it were her own eulogy she wrote, to be read at her funeral. More ‘impactful’ meant more dramatic. I love her for that. She also thought that I'd start thinking about her dying, feel guilty and find a way to get her home. That's how it started out. Then it became real to her; a chance to maybe explain herself, to leave each of us with something that carried us through the grief and perhaps made up for some of the things she did while she was alive. Something to remind us of the funny, zany Elsie, not just the angry one. My grandma wasn't good with apologies. I'm reasonably sure every single one of my cousins can hear in their heads how she said I'm sorry. "Well... I'm sorrYY if you're upset."
Her thinking, regarding the eulogy, was that she would talk about each of her children, how she felt about them, some things she regretted, and some of the things she loved. She’d talk about each of her grandchildren and how they had changed her life and how she'd impacted them, sometimes negative and sometimes positive. She wanted me to take notes and ‘clean it up and make it sound right.’ It took almost a year to write. She’d add and take away. She’d remember something she wanted to say and then change her mind a few months later. The more she talked and the more I wrote for her the more I saw her. Not just as my grammies, but as someone's sister and aunt and wife and mother. As someone else's grandmother. She believed the best of each of us, even when we didn't. None of us was a lost cause, even at the times we were.
Sometimes she was downright mean to her family. She could cut us in two with her tongue. And she did. She would humiliate and break your heart. I can't tell you it came from a place of love, because I don't think it did. She wasn't trying to make us stronger or teach us a lesson, she was trying to work out her own personal demons and at times family was the line of fire. Who knows what deep hurt caused that. She couldn't think of any reason for it. She wished she didn't do it. She'd have taken it back. But she couldn't. Her eulogy, she felt, was a place where she could finally say she was sorry. The very last thing she could say.
But my grandma was good to me. She took me to pick berries every summer; taught me to make jelly and jam. She teased that she took me because, then and now, I will not eat anything ending in erry. For that reason, she found a plum tree to make a little jelly just for me. She sang "Bicycle Built for Two" to me when she saw me in my Prom dress. She hugged us and kissed us and called us sweet pea. She cut up apples and froze bananas so we'd eat them and made chocolate pudding without that yucky skin on the top. She thought ice cream cured homesickness, which she called Grandma’s House Stomach Ache. She made me laugh a million times more than she made me cry. She held me when my dad died and said "Honey, you know he was crazy about you." She was my center, my peace and my home.
She didn't get to go home because of the eulogy. Her dementia made that happen. The eulogy was read, word for word, at her funeral. She wanted no prayers, no scripture, just what she had to say. As I listened to the funeral director, Tina, read it I knew what was coming. I knew which member of Elsie's family would be the next touched and moved and gifted by words directly from her heart to theirs. Last words. I could hear her voice in my head talking about her kids and grandkids. I heard the love; I heard the regret; I heard the hope of forgiveness and the hope that we'd remember the good and soften the bad. It broke my heart. I count myself lucky though, to have been given that gift, to have felt that love as she created what was her final message to us. Dramatic, no?
I don’t miss the 6 am Sunday phone calls telling me to “get your ass out of bed, you’re wasting the day.” Actually, I’d even take one more of those. Just one more, “Well, hello Leasie” “I love you sweet pea.” “I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” Just one more wobbly-voiced “You’d look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.” If you're lucky enough to have a grandmother, ask her to give you a book from her library; I promise you won't regret it. I'd take one more story, even if it was one I heard a million times before.
I miss her like hell. The sun and the moon, Grammies.
