My Aging Grandma
I've stumbled into the life of being my grandmother's caretaker.
I got here, to Orem Utah, in April of 2016, with the intention to stay for about a month, maybe a summer, as she recovered from treatment for leukemia, and some of the weird ailments that were caught up in that knot of disease-symtom-treatment-side-effect. Weeping legs, wounds, swelling, rattly boxes of medications to be halved, powdered, gagged down, remembered. And then admonitions to get enough fiber, to get enough vitamin D; to make sure the sleep apnea wasn't becoming a problem, to have distilled water on hand-- don't forget the probiotics!
I've always loved this grandma, so much. She's so positive and kind. This is where I'd come as a teenager in tumultuous Washington DC, wrestling with being a round peg in a square religion, to detox and feel loved. She was a sacred place, a living sacrament.
So when the specter of her mortality reared up, I felt urgently that I wanted to come and help take care of her.
We were here in Utah when my husband died by suicide in Hawaii.
And I recognize the blessing aka luck aka privilege I had to have a place to crash and burn. We lost our home (since it was provided by my husband's job) and if the universe had been a slightly different place we could have ended up as trolls under a bridge. We had no place to go. Homelessness is not something that happens to *other* people. Technically, we still qualify as homeless, according to our school district's Mickinney-Vento form. I appreciate the free/reduced lunches and the boost that status gave us when we were trying for a position at the local Montessori charter school. But it's still spooky as hell.
Anyway, it was a pretty soft crash landing. Soft as 30 year old carpet and vast blue faux leather couches.
And it has been beautiful, frustrating, and wonderful to be a witness to my grandmother's aging.
She's just turned 86. I hope that when I am 86 I am as loved by my friends as my grandma. There's a steady stream of visitors from her LDS ward, and from the Orem Literary League, aka OrLitLa, est. 1931; and from old friends from her childhood in Pleasant Grove, and her married life around the country and here in Utah Valley. Her dearest friend has lived next door since the 1960s. They've lost marriages, children, jobs, health, husbands... Before living with her, I never would have imagined the strength and importance-- the vibrancy of these friendships. I remember being a little put out a few years ago when I came to visit around my birthday, and she declined an invitation to come to a birthday dinner for me, in favor for going to a church party in her neighborhood. But now I understand. Her family has scattered: we are all over the world. But her friends are the day to day sustenance. She loves us, of course, and makes each grand child feel like the very favorite dearest apple of her eye, but now I realize that we just come to take. We come and enjoy her. She is nurtured and sustained by other relationships-- by her friends.
She has a weekly memoir-writing group with other octogenarian ladies. They bring their notebooks, ask one another interesting questions about their lives, and share what they've written. These reminiscences sparked amazing memories for grandma, and I got to hear some of them. Of course, I like the dark and queer ones. The handsome teacher who was molesting the other girls in her class. The way the older cousins used to hide in the coffins in grandpa's attic (he was a Gateway Coffin Salesman, based out of St. Louis, after his wife had her nth kid and insisted he give up his job as a miner in Park City and move to Provo) and jump out to scare her and her sister, or when these same rotten cousins pulled her into the closet and tried to kiss her... Or the younger sister of her mother who had a child out of wedlock who the mother raised, and then ran off to marry some rich Las Vegas tycoon, and would swan back to Provo during the depression, wearing furs and diamonds and jewels. And the beloved aunt Afton who only wore overalls and spoke in a booming voice and was a whiz at wallpapering, and the way Grandma Davis cowered every time Grandpa Davis spoke, and the time he threw a student in his Health class up against the wall, and the time her dad got shot in the face and lost his hearing and sight in one eye.
These stories amaze me. I'll go on. When her parents went to California she was left to milk the cow, who charged off into the ditch and made her late for school. And when the war ended, she was a 14 year old, visiting her aunt who was a real live riveter in a factory! The first time she met my smarmy grandfather at a BYU music camp (taught, incidentally, by my maternal grandfather), she told him a false name and intentionally had him drop her off (in his fancy Ford in 1945, can you imagine) and the junkiest house in town-- just unpainted plywood and a wrecked yard, and Old Mister M---- out in the front yard in nothing but overalls! And she took a year before college to work at her high school as the secretary, and when she had saved up for a whole year, she decided to go on a study abroad to Europe! This would have been about 1949 or 1950! Germany was still in rubble! On that trip she met up with my future grandfather, who was an LDS missionary at the time. And there's some story about him bringing home a car, or a motorcycle from his mission? I'm fuzzier on his history, he was an entitled sadistic cheating SOB and I don't care to know much more than that about him. He had a picture of himself perform penis surgery on his wall. I don't know what else I need to say about him. Other than when he left, my grandma had to take her shoes and stockings off, and walk to her job substitute teaching with tender bare feet, gravel slicing into her toes and arches and heels. She had to leave the kids at home, the youngest of 8 just little toddlers, and go and climb over the pasture fence, and walk through the hay, and lie down in the ditch, on the thistles and rocks. "It was the right place to be." When I got my husband's autopsy report, (all of his organs perfect, everything in perfect health. Also; super fucking dead.) she told me that story. She went and lay in the ditch. As I read it, I had to lie on the floor, on my belly, trying and wishing to be swallowed up by the earth. She understood that. She'd been there. She'd been in the ditch.
When my grandma was a young woman, she hopped on a train with a couple of other girls from Pleasant Grove, and with letters of introduction from the well-connection Utah GP, shipped out to work as orderlies as a mental hospital in Manhattan! They led the inmates in games and socialized with the hardened New Yorkers who could not decipher these pristine desert roses. In fact, one night the other workers asked Betty Jo and her friends out for drinks (aka cokes, I'm sure) and took them, I KID YOU NOT, to a gay bar. A GAY BAR IN 1950, my friends. Grandma says she had a wonderful time although she was confused a little about why the waiters looked like women dressed like men and the dancers looked like men dressed like women. She said she didn't even realize what she had seen till RECENTLY. Like, 60 years later she goes, "Waaaaaait, Gay!!!" She said her bully in elementary school became her good friend in high school, and their clique was the envy of all of PG high. Their hair was the biggest, their skirts the starchiest! The ringleader later became a girls volleyball coach who lived happily ever after with one of her early female pupils. "There was never a word for it," she mused. "It seems fine though...there are these ladies in the ward..."
She's staunchly anti-racist. It's an innate position with the world for her, not something she's learned form school or church. She said once she told her mother, at the ripe old age of 14 or so, as a white girl in very white Utah, in 1945, that if she fell in love with a Black man, of course she would marry him! This scandalized her mother. She was deeply troubled when she and Duane lived in the South during segregation, and black gentlemen would get off of the sidewalk to let her pass. She would tell them, No, please, don't do that for me. She's only ever rejoiced in differences, delighted in diversity, and been inspired by learning about people different from her.
So she's good. She's good people. She's traveled the world-- Ukraine and the Baltic just a few years ago, and she lived a few years in Germany as a proselyting LDS missionary, pounding the pavement and shedding the pounds with much younger and more energetic companions. She came to my oldest baby's blessing on the Big Island and then her 1 year lu'au a year later, and when we were little she visited us in Holland. She's been all over Europe and the US.
So she's adventurous and generous and brave.
A habit that I appreciate when applied to myself but find exasperating at every other time is her determination to rewrite every story for the better. My cousin came and took her cute little black BMW without asking, and never returned it. To this day. A few days later the story had morphed. "Oh, no. I gave it to him, it was my idea." A neighbor family encroached onto her property, finally building a tennis court ten feet into her land. "Oh-- they're wonderful. They paid the water bill for me and cleaned up the land!" No, they didn't. But to argue is to be the bad guy, and for what? Why would I want her to trust her neighbors less, or to resent my cousin? Fine. I give in to the Pollyanna. It's her car; it's her property. She can do whatever she's comfortable with. Harrumph.
But when she shines that positive beam on me, goodness, it glows. I look up high-iron foods and cook mussels and liver for dinner, she tells me I'm the best cook she's ever known. I boss and cajole her into take her medication and doing her physical therapy, and she says she doesn't know what she'd do without me. And that glow feels so good. I wish I could see the world the way she does-- that I could flip the manipulative, selfish, shortsighted things that everyone does into kindness, generosity, and goodness. I have the inverse of her lens, and I can see the shadow to every situation. She refuses to see anything but light.
And now she's growing older. She's slowing down.
Do you know that feeling when you intend to get up and have breakfast, and then you just don't get around to it, for three hours? Or that feeling when someone is talking to you, but you're listening to the lyrics on the radio and so you miss what they've said but you can sort of half-guess and carry on with the conversation as if you were paying attention all along? Or when you read a book when it was 3 in the morning and you can't remember if it was a real book or a netflix series or a dream? Or when you bustle into a room and you have no idea why you're there? Those are all fairly normal brain glitches. Distraction, it feels like. A brain with a great problem to consider-- a stressed brain. And that has been her brain lately. It's hard to see in those Swiss cheese moments. It's easy to panic. The other day she forgot she had a wallet. She didn't forget where her wallet was-- she forgot THAT IT EXISTED. And when I reminded her, did a google image search for similar wallets-- no bells were a-ringing. Luckily, it turned up. But there was still no spark of recognition. That was a spooky moment.
But then those moments are balanced or maybe outweighed with moments of total acuity and clarity. The exact measurements of the newest grandbaby born a week ago. The precise amount of the check cashed 3 days ago.
It's hard to witness this, to be a player on the stage of this transforming brain. I'm the reminder-- here's your medicine. Don't forget your physical therapy; let's do it together. You have an appointment today. Yes you take this twice. Lunch was 6 hours ago, let's eat. I'm an unwilling nag. I see the patchy bits. I hear the wind whistling through the holes.
It's chilling.
When I am an old lady, if I ever make it that far, I hope to have friends like she does. I suppose that in order to have friends who love you that much, you have to believe only the best about people. In fact you sort of have to believe that they are all precious perfect infallible unicorns, actually, in order to love them that much.
When I am an old lady, I hope that I can name my favorite tunes after hearing just one precise chord the way she can. I hope I can look back on a lifetime of travel and relationship.
I hope my kids will want to spend time, basking in my presence, the way I want to spend time with grandma. Even though now she is smaller, whiter, delicate as a dried rose, she still radiates low-grade goodness, all the time. She sheds it, like charged ions into the atmosphere.
I got here, to Orem Utah, in April of 2016, with the intention to stay for about a month, maybe a summer, as she recovered from treatment for leukemia, and some of the weird ailments that were caught up in that knot of disease-symtom-treatment-side-effect. Weeping legs, wounds, swelling, rattly boxes of medications to be halved, powdered, gagged down, remembered. And then admonitions to get enough fiber, to get enough vitamin D; to make sure the sleep apnea wasn't becoming a problem, to have distilled water on hand-- don't forget the probiotics!
I've always loved this grandma, so much. She's so positive and kind. This is where I'd come as a teenager in tumultuous Washington DC, wrestling with being a round peg in a square religion, to detox and feel loved. She was a sacred place, a living sacrament.
So when the specter of her mortality reared up, I felt urgently that I wanted to come and help take care of her.
We were here in Utah when my husband died by suicide in Hawaii.
And I recognize the blessing aka luck aka privilege I had to have a place to crash and burn. We lost our home (since it was provided by my husband's job) and if the universe had been a slightly different place we could have ended up as trolls under a bridge. We had no place to go. Homelessness is not something that happens to *other* people. Technically, we still qualify as homeless, according to our school district's Mickinney-Vento form. I appreciate the free/reduced lunches and the boost that status gave us when we were trying for a position at the local Montessori charter school. But it's still spooky as hell.
Anyway, it was a pretty soft crash landing. Soft as 30 year old carpet and vast blue faux leather couches.
And it has been beautiful, frustrating, and wonderful to be a witness to my grandmother's aging.
She's just turned 86. I hope that when I am 86 I am as loved by my friends as my grandma. There's a steady stream of visitors from her LDS ward, and from the Orem Literary League, aka OrLitLa, est. 1931; and from old friends from her childhood in Pleasant Grove, and her married life around the country and here in Utah Valley. Her dearest friend has lived next door since the 1960s. They've lost marriages, children, jobs, health, husbands... Before living with her, I never would have imagined the strength and importance-- the vibrancy of these friendships. I remember being a little put out a few years ago when I came to visit around my birthday, and she declined an invitation to come to a birthday dinner for me, in favor for going to a church party in her neighborhood. But now I understand. Her family has scattered: we are all over the world. But her friends are the day to day sustenance. She loves us, of course, and makes each grand child feel like the very favorite dearest apple of her eye, but now I realize that we just come to take. We come and enjoy her. She is nurtured and sustained by other relationships-- by her friends.
She has a weekly memoir-writing group with other octogenarian ladies. They bring their notebooks, ask one another interesting questions about their lives, and share what they've written. These reminiscences sparked amazing memories for grandma, and I got to hear some of them. Of course, I like the dark and queer ones. The handsome teacher who was molesting the other girls in her class. The way the older cousins used to hide in the coffins in grandpa's attic (he was a Gateway Coffin Salesman, based out of St. Louis, after his wife had her nth kid and insisted he give up his job as a miner in Park City and move to Provo) and jump out to scare her and her sister, or when these same rotten cousins pulled her into the closet and tried to kiss her... Or the younger sister of her mother who had a child out of wedlock who the mother raised, and then ran off to marry some rich Las Vegas tycoon, and would swan back to Provo during the depression, wearing furs and diamonds and jewels. And the beloved aunt Afton who only wore overalls and spoke in a booming voice and was a whiz at wallpapering, and the way Grandma Davis cowered every time Grandpa Davis spoke, and the time he threw a student in his Health class up against the wall, and the time her dad got shot in the face and lost his hearing and sight in one eye.
These stories amaze me. I'll go on. When her parents went to California she was left to milk the cow, who charged off into the ditch and made her late for school. And when the war ended, she was a 14 year old, visiting her aunt who was a real live riveter in a factory! The first time she met my smarmy grandfather at a BYU music camp (taught, incidentally, by my maternal grandfather), she told him a false name and intentionally had him drop her off (in his fancy Ford in 1945, can you imagine) and the junkiest house in town-- just unpainted plywood and a wrecked yard, and Old Mister M---- out in the front yard in nothing but overalls! And she took a year before college to work at her high school as the secretary, and when she had saved up for a whole year, she decided to go on a study abroad to Europe! This would have been about 1949 or 1950! Germany was still in rubble! On that trip she met up with my future grandfather, who was an LDS missionary at the time. And there's some story about him bringing home a car, or a motorcycle from his mission? I'm fuzzier on his history, he was an entitled sadistic cheating SOB and I don't care to know much more than that about him. He had a picture of himself perform penis surgery on his wall. I don't know what else I need to say about him. Other than when he left, my grandma had to take her shoes and stockings off, and walk to her job substitute teaching with tender bare feet, gravel slicing into her toes and arches and heels. She had to leave the kids at home, the youngest of 8 just little toddlers, and go and climb over the pasture fence, and walk through the hay, and lie down in the ditch, on the thistles and rocks. "It was the right place to be." When I got my husband's autopsy report, (all of his organs perfect, everything in perfect health. Also; super fucking dead.) she told me that story. She went and lay in the ditch. As I read it, I had to lie on the floor, on my belly, trying and wishing to be swallowed up by the earth. She understood that. She'd been there. She'd been in the ditch.
When my grandma was a young woman, she hopped on a train with a couple of other girls from Pleasant Grove, and with letters of introduction from the well-connection Utah GP, shipped out to work as orderlies as a mental hospital in Manhattan! They led the inmates in games and socialized with the hardened New Yorkers who could not decipher these pristine desert roses. In fact, one night the other workers asked Betty Jo and her friends out for drinks (aka cokes, I'm sure) and took them, I KID YOU NOT, to a gay bar. A GAY BAR IN 1950, my friends. Grandma says she had a wonderful time although she was confused a little about why the waiters looked like women dressed like men and the dancers looked like men dressed like women. She said she didn't even realize what she had seen till RECENTLY. Like, 60 years later she goes, "Waaaaaait, Gay!!!" She said her bully in elementary school became her good friend in high school, and their clique was the envy of all of PG high. Their hair was the biggest, their skirts the starchiest! The ringleader later became a girls volleyball coach who lived happily ever after with one of her early female pupils. "There was never a word for it," she mused. "It seems fine though...there are these ladies in the ward..."
She's staunchly anti-racist. It's an innate position with the world for her, not something she's learned form school or church. She said once she told her mother, at the ripe old age of 14 or so, as a white girl in very white Utah, in 1945, that if she fell in love with a Black man, of course she would marry him! This scandalized her mother. She was deeply troubled when she and Duane lived in the South during segregation, and black gentlemen would get off of the sidewalk to let her pass. She would tell them, No, please, don't do that for me. She's only ever rejoiced in differences, delighted in diversity, and been inspired by learning about people different from her.
So she's good. She's good people. She's traveled the world-- Ukraine and the Baltic just a few years ago, and she lived a few years in Germany as a proselyting LDS missionary, pounding the pavement and shedding the pounds with much younger and more energetic companions. She came to my oldest baby's blessing on the Big Island and then her 1 year lu'au a year later, and when we were little she visited us in Holland. She's been all over Europe and the US.
So she's adventurous and generous and brave.
A habit that I appreciate when applied to myself but find exasperating at every other time is her determination to rewrite every story for the better. My cousin came and took her cute little black BMW without asking, and never returned it. To this day. A few days later the story had morphed. "Oh, no. I gave it to him, it was my idea." A neighbor family encroached onto her property, finally building a tennis court ten feet into her land. "Oh-- they're wonderful. They paid the water bill for me and cleaned up the land!" No, they didn't. But to argue is to be the bad guy, and for what? Why would I want her to trust her neighbors less, or to resent my cousin? Fine. I give in to the Pollyanna. It's her car; it's her property. She can do whatever she's comfortable with. Harrumph.
But when she shines that positive beam on me, goodness, it glows. I look up high-iron foods and cook mussels and liver for dinner, she tells me I'm the best cook she's ever known. I boss and cajole her into take her medication and doing her physical therapy, and she says she doesn't know what she'd do without me. And that glow feels so good. I wish I could see the world the way she does-- that I could flip the manipulative, selfish, shortsighted things that everyone does into kindness, generosity, and goodness. I have the inverse of her lens, and I can see the shadow to every situation. She refuses to see anything but light.
And now she's growing older. She's slowing down.
Do you know that feeling when you intend to get up and have breakfast, and then you just don't get around to it, for three hours? Or that feeling when someone is talking to you, but you're listening to the lyrics on the radio and so you miss what they've said but you can sort of half-guess and carry on with the conversation as if you were paying attention all along? Or when you read a book when it was 3 in the morning and you can't remember if it was a real book or a netflix series or a dream? Or when you bustle into a room and you have no idea why you're there? Those are all fairly normal brain glitches. Distraction, it feels like. A brain with a great problem to consider-- a stressed brain. And that has been her brain lately. It's hard to see in those Swiss cheese moments. It's easy to panic. The other day she forgot she had a wallet. She didn't forget where her wallet was-- she forgot THAT IT EXISTED. And when I reminded her, did a google image search for similar wallets-- no bells were a-ringing. Luckily, it turned up. But there was still no spark of recognition. That was a spooky moment.
But then those moments are balanced or maybe outweighed with moments of total acuity and clarity. The exact measurements of the newest grandbaby born a week ago. The precise amount of the check cashed 3 days ago.
It's hard to witness this, to be a player on the stage of this transforming brain. I'm the reminder-- here's your medicine. Don't forget your physical therapy; let's do it together. You have an appointment today. Yes you take this twice. Lunch was 6 hours ago, let's eat. I'm an unwilling nag. I see the patchy bits. I hear the wind whistling through the holes.
It's chilling.
When I am an old lady, if I ever make it that far, I hope to have friends like she does. I suppose that in order to have friends who love you that much, you have to believe only the best about people. In fact you sort of have to believe that they are all precious perfect infallible unicorns, actually, in order to love them that much.
When I am an old lady, I hope that I can name my favorite tunes after hearing just one precise chord the way she can. I hope I can look back on a lifetime of travel and relationship.
I hope my kids will want to spend time, basking in my presence, the way I want to spend time with grandma. Even though now she is smaller, whiter, delicate as a dried rose, she still radiates low-grade goodness, all the time. She sheds it, like charged ions into the atmosphere.
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