When I was thirteen and my brother was eleven my parents sat us down and told us they needed to have a serious talk. I burst into tears, certain they were about to announce their imminent divorce. That wasn’t the case. Instead, my mom and dad somberly explained that my granny and granddaddy weren’t doing so well living alone in their apartment in Richmond, Virginia and my parents and my dad’s brother and sister decided the best thing for them would be for them to relocate to our home in Denver. My granddaddy would live with us and my granny would move into a nursing home a few miles from our house. How did we feel about that, my parents wanted to know. This question confused me. How did I feel about this? I felt terrible, of course. This was primarily because of my granny. She was in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease. The medication she took to control her tremors had stolen her mind. She alternated between violent shaking and fierce rigidity and her thoughts never made any sense. I was completely terrified of her. I heard stories about her loyalty, intelligence, and sensibility but that wasn’t the woman I ever knew. I preferred how things were currently set-up, with them far, far away.
My parents were both busy working professionals. My mom was an extremely successful Health and Safety manager, routinely traveling to factories all over the country to conduct inspections. My dad worked in upper management for a tech company. My brother and I were latchkey kids, accustomed to coming home to an empty house, helping ourselves to fruit snacks and watching three hours of cartoons and working on homework. My parents clearly loved the two of us and each other, but grand gestures of devotion were not something that fit into their extremely busy schedule. We had dinner together every night and my parents faithfully attended all our school functions, but otherwise our lives were consumed with the day-to-day minutiae so common in young families. I had no desire for an interloper to come in and disrupt our happy routine.
At thirteen though, you have little control into how your household is run, and inevitably, my grandfather moved into the upstairs guest room. His little space was sparsely decorated and he had to share a bathroom with my brother and me. Almost immediately he started giving unwanted advice. The way my mom cooked and kept the house, my brother’s poor school performance, and even on one memorable occasion, the way my dad performed the Heimlich maneuver, all fell under his critical eye. I was the only one who escaped his constant reprimands, though I could never say why. He couldn’t escape my constant annoyance however. From the way he left his dishes in the sink to the time he spent showering but most of all, the inordinate amount of time he spent with my granny was alternately a source of confusion and irritation.
Every morning, almost regardless of weather conditions, my granddaddy went to visit my granny. He would shower, neatly comb his hair and apply a splash of Old Spice. In my memory, he wore the same outfit every day: a short-sleeved, blue button-down shirt tucked into black slacks and black dress shoes. He wasn’t a flashy dresser, but he was always as neat as a pin. He would shuffle to his maroon Oldsmobile and go to my granny’s nursing home, driving fifteen miles under the speed limit. My parents privately discussed taking away his driver’s license, but didn’t have the heart, because to do so would keep him away from the only person he really wanted to see. I’m not sure if my granny even knew who he was, but I can say with certainty that it didn’t matter to him. He would go and sit with her, his days completely devoted to my granny’s well-being. He would come home and admonish us for our shameful lack of visiting. “She’d really like to see you,” he’d say. I found this unlikely. On one visit, she thought my brother was a girl, and then spent the rest of the visit mumbling semi-incoherently about the farm she grew up on. I couldn’t understand that, even if it didn’t really mean anything to her, it would mean something to him. In fact, I regarded his whole devotion to her with bafflement and bewilderment. Why would he possibly want to just sit with her, day in and day out, instead of doing things and having fun? He should be enjoying himself: going bowling, mingling at the senior center and all the other activities I assumed the elderly engaged in based on my exposure to popular television. In fact, the only thing he wanted out of life was to live one day longer than my granny so that he would be able to take care of her until her end.
My granddaddy was not an expressive man. He was quiet, stern, and not overly affectionate. His four older brothers all died young from the black lung that ravaged coal miners in the early part of the 20th century. He escaped the coal mines by joining the military and went to the Pacific during World War II. He was separated from my granny and their kids for almost four years. Once he came home he needed another year of treatment at Walter Reed Medical Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Throughout this my granny was the family’s rock. She worked, took care of the kids, and kept their house. It’s fair to say that he never would have recovered from his war experience if not for my granny’s utter patience and devotion. She was tough, independent, and at times sharp tongued. My dad told me that she didn’t suffer fools gladly and he meant it as a compliment, not as a passive-aggressive insult. When my granddaddy was in danger of slipping from the melancholic waters he always waded, to the deep ocean beyond it, it was she that grasped his arm and served as a life vest. Her love for him may not have been tender or coddling but she showed it the best way that she knew how.
When my granny was sick with Parkinson’s, and as it got worse, my granddaddy became tender to her in a way that he never had been when my father was a boy. He was immensely protective of her, guarding her against the discomforts he could control. He was finally able to repay the devotion that she had shown to him, and he never wavered for a moment. Frankly, she probably didn’t know that he sat with her eight hours a day, took her to her meals, held her hand while she slept. But he did it anyway because he loved her with every fiber of his being, even if he didn’t know how to express it with words. As a teenager I didn’t understand it but I understand it now and am grateful that I was able to witness such a selfless display of love. My granny died when she was 80 and I think that when she passed a part of my granddaddy went with her. His health rapidly declined when he no longer had her to look after, although he lived for another five years, most of them confined to a nursing home bed with a diminishing degree of lucidity.
As an adult, with a husband of my own, what I saw my granddaddy do for my granny has been more important than any other act of love I’ve seen between two people. Neither of them were perfect, but nevertheless showed the sacrifice one person will willingly make for someone they love, when the other person isn’t capable of walking down the path of life without help. In the end that’s what a marriage, what any meaningful relationship, is about. Sometimes it is as simple as holding a hand, sitting patiently by a bedside. Sometimes all that matters is being there.
3 comments:
You should have won.
Thank you very much. :)
Brought tears to my eyes. So touching.
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