Sorry for the radio silence these past few weeks. My grandmother passed away a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve been down in Texas, dealing with family stuff and the funeral. I wrote the following author’s note for my newsletter, and it seemed like something worth sharing on the blog, so I’m posting it here too. Hopefully I’ll be back to posting on a regular schedule next week.
In my last newsletter, I mentioned that my last surviving grandmother had recently passed away. We all went down to Texas for the funeral last week, and it went surprisingly well.
My grandmother lived a very long life, and her passing wasn’t unexpected. She had a stroke about fifteen years ago, and had also been struggling with dimentia. The last time I had a conversation with her where she remembered who I was was probably a decade ago. Thankfully, she was very well taken care of by my uncle’s family in Texas and a team of nurses who helped take care of her. She lived in the old family home right until she went into hospice about two weeks before her passing. The picture above is of her and grandpa, probably from sometime in the late 70s.
My grandmother grew up dirt poor in southern Illinois during the Great Depression. My grandfather grew up in a Texas Czech community, played football for the Los Angeles Rams and the Buffalo Bills (one of my cousins actually tracked down his rookie card, which goes for something like $600 now), and later went into the oil business. One thing I learned during this trip was that grandma was actually the one who gave him the idea of starting his own company when the firm he was working at went under. From what I understand, it was a difficult time to be in the oil business, but they slogged through the hard times and eventually did quite well.
From what I’ve heard, back in those days most networking was done at formal dinner parties that people threw in their own homes. Grandma’s house was apparently one of the premier places to have a dinner party, with a huge living room, a grand piano, wool carpeting, insane amounts of Waterford crystal, and a light with a dimmer back in the 60s when nobody had dimmers for their lights. She also had her own hobby business painting knick knacks, and had a whole bedroom full of them, as well as an insane collection of nativity sets, little glass angels, snow homes, and beanie babies.
So when we weren’t at the wake or the funeral or the interment, we were all basically going through the 60+ years of stuff that grandma acquired over the course of her lifetime, trying to figure out what to do with it all. It wasn’t difficult to imagine her smiling down on us as we went through it all, finding all sorts of unexpected treasures and divying them out.
There was more than enough for everyone to take what they wanted, including the nurses who cared for her the last fifteen years: even after we’d all gone through the crystal glassware and put our names on what we wanted, only about half of it had been claimed. So there wasn’t much fighting over stuff at all; it was all very much “you should take this,” “no, you should take it.”
One of the more interesting things was to go through all of the old letters that we’d sent her. She held on to all of them right up until her stroke. I found a bunch of letters that I’d written her while on my mission (and since forgotten about), and my sister found all of the ones that she’d written while in treatment for her eating disorder. It was good to know that she treasured those.
I also found my dad’s old mechanical typewriter, from back in the 70s! It needs a new ribbon, but otherwise seems to work quite well. At some point, I’d like to try my hand at writing the way Harlan Ellison used to write: sitting in a shop window with his mechanical typewriter, tapping out stories and pasting them onto the glass for passersby to read, one page at a time.
It was also fun to go through all of her spare change, which she’d accumulated over the years. Most of the coins weren’t all that old or interesting, but my wife found a 1905 Indian Head cent, and I found about $4 in junk silver, plus some old commemorative series. So now I keep one of grandma’s 1921 Morgan silver dollars in my pocket, instead of the 1 oz round that I used to carry.
This was my wife’s first time visiting Texas, so we took some time off the last day we were there to get some Texas Bar B Q and check out the Petroleum Museum. Interesting stuff. I remember my grandpa taking me there as a little kid, and seeing the diorama that depicts how the Permian Basin used to look in the Paleozoic period. The museum itself has been renovated since then, but they kept the original diorama, which was cool.
So that was basically our visit. The wake was a lot more formal than we were expecting, and we missed half of it because our baby got hungry and had to be taken back to the house, but the funeral and interment went very well. Standing there at the grave brought back some memories from when we buried grandpa back in 2003, just before my mission. Other than that, it was good to see everyone and spend some time together as an extended family.
It’s an interesting exercise to ponder the trajectory that our full lives take. Growing up in a broken home during the Great Depression, or during the early years of grandpa’s business when everything was so uncertain, I think that if grandma could have seen how things would eventually turn out for her and her future family, she would have been blown away. When I look back on the trajectory of my own life, I wonder if I’ll have similar feelings. We’ve been very blessed these last couple of years, even with all of the craziness that’s been happening in the world, but keeping up with the writing industry is still very much a struggle, and there are still a lot of uncertainties. But I’m confident that no matter how things work out, it will be for the best in the end.
Those are some of my current thoughts, anyways. How about yours? As always, thanks for reading!
Joe
