The Best We Could

So. It’s been a couple of weeks, and eventful ones. The day after I wrote the post before this one, I got a call from a cousin telling me that my grandmother was not doing well. I drove down to central Illinois to see her, and I was shocked by how much she had faltered since my last visit, which was only three weeks before. The retirement home staff told me that a good friend of hers had passed away a few weeks earlier, and she had essentially decided that she was finished. She had stopped eating and stopped taking her medication.

So I called my brothers and my cousin, and eventually everyone got down there to be with her. She died on the following Monday the 19^th. I miss her, but it’s hard to be sad for her, in a way. She was 99 years old and had been ready to move on for several years. She had told me many times in the last few years that she has outlived everyone—her siblings, her husband, her two daughters and most of her friends. As we sat together in the hospital that last weekend, she said “I’m 99 years old. I’ve had a good life and a good family. I don’t want to be 100.” She died as she lived—a tough, stubborn woman who knew what she wanted and made it happen.

I always had a kind of difficult relationship with her. I have one cousin; she’s four years older than I am and has always made more conventional life choices than have I. Even when we were kids and teenagers, she was learning to cook and sew, and I was reading and drawing. Her family lived in a small community nearby, mine had moved away from the Midwest when I was a baby and had always lived in the suburbs of big cities. With the benefit of grownup perspective I see that my cousin was just more familiar to my grandmother. They made sense to one another. But growing up I always felt unappreciated and unseen.

Once my mother died, I tried to get closer to my grandmother as a way to stay connected to that side of the family. I remember trying really hard to think of things she would want to do with me (cards? Scrabble? Looking through antique books? Drives in the country?). I once spent a bunch of time researching a particular kind of glassware that she collected so that we’d have something to talk about when I came to visit. None of it worked, really, and ultimately I just had to learn to be content with our imperfect connection. One day we were talking on the phone as I was nearing the end of graduate school, and she said to me “I don’t really understand what you do, but I’m sure proud of you.” That brings tears to my eyes even now. I still wish we had learned not to be such strangers to each other, but I think we both did the best we could.