Both of my grandmothers died in the mid-1960s, when I was an adolescent. My grandfathers died much earlier.
I have few memories of any of them. They were all in their 40s when they had my parents--both the youngest in the family. And all four had been used up by the Depression by the time I came along.
My grandmother on my mother's side tripped over a pig guard in their gate when I was a child. After that she went into a nursing home where she lay there until she died, about 10 years later I believe. She didn't need to live there because of physical reasons---she was just beat. Done. We would visit her once a year, and I and my sister would spend a few minutes with her until our mother said we could go outside and play. We didn't know what else to do.
This grandmother's husband, my grandpa on my mother's side, was someone I remember well, even though he died when I was about five years old. When I would visit he would wake me early in the morning, warm my clothes over the coal-burning stove, and take me out to do chores with him. The memories of going out with him in those cold Iowa mornings are so strong, and meaningful, 65 years later. I want to know my grandpa, a man who lost everything in the Great Depression and who never recovered.
My other grandfather was an alcoholic who I met only a couple of times, living in a single-room apartment in Omaha. He too died when I was about five years old. My father dutifully went to visit him, although he did very little for my father. My father slept in the same room as his mother for years as a boy to protect his mother from his abuse by his father. How did this affect my father? I'll never know, although he dedicated his life, successfully I might add, in every way, to making sure this was not his children's lives. My dad. Gone now. And my mother too.
His mother, in my father's eyes, was a saint. When my father went to war after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he sent her money every month. When he returned home, she gave it all back to him--saving it all for him, even though she lived in abject poverty and could have used the money on herself. So, he turned around and used the money to build her a bathroom in her home, the only one she ever had, and gave her running water so that washing clothes for the rich people in town would be easier for her.
But I never really knew her. She had so little to give emotionally by the time my sister Kathy and I came along. Pictures I have of her at that time show her as so solemn. There was probably little joy, ever, in her life. Struggles. Heartbreak. She lost two children--one an infant, and another when she was a young woman. That young woman's husband left their child with my grandma who raised him to be a grateful son.
I have a few of her possessions. That's remarkable because she had only a few. I remember hearing a story about a piece of furniture that she obtained in Omaha that, when brought back to her home in Carson, Iowa, had been damaged by a rope that tied it to the car. She cried when she saw the damage. She probably had so few nice things, and this one was damaged before it even arrived in her home. It probably represented her life. This story stuck with me, since my childhood. My father tried to give her nice things after the war when he could afford to.
One piece of furniture of hers, an end table, had been in pieces for years. I decided this summer to see if I could salvage it and bring it back to life. One piece needed repair by someone with a woodworking shop, so that was done last year.
I set to work on it.
It was a challenge to fix the legs, as there was really no place to attach them. But I found a solution.
And now it is in our home, and every time I look at it I will think of her.
How I wish I could talk with her. I want so much to find out what her life was like. She died when I was a young adolescent, and I didn't think of those things then. What adolescent does?
What did she do as a child? Where did she meet my grandfather? What stories does she remember about my father as a child, as an adolescent, etc.?
But, alas, these things are no longer knowable.
It reminds me of the final lines of the Replicant Roy, in Blade Runner, one of my top 10 movies of all time:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears...in...rain.
These memories my grandmother had are lost in time, like tears....in....rain.
I love the Grandma I never knew, and never will.
