I will always remember

It was on this date, Feb. 22, in 1995, when my only living grandparent passed away.

I was at work when I got the call. I collapsed onto the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. When my brother and I arrived at the place where she'd died, and we got out of the car, I heard sand hill cranes calling somewhere above the clouds.

She was 94 and a half years old, and had been suffering- on and off- for 5 years, with congestive heart problems. On that day, she just...went to sleep. She went to meet her waiting husband, on the other side.

She'd been seeing him around her, and talking to him in her dozes, as I sat nearby, reading.

She'd been in the hospital that winter, again, and had been moved to the convalescent center (where she was mis-treated by an orderly, who was fired on my demands), and then back to her residential senior center.
But, rather than going back to her own apartment, she needed extra care, so she was still in the assisted living wing when she went to sleep.

This was the woman who rescued me when I ran away from my abusive mother as a kid. This was the woman I was named after. This was the woman who was the closest one to my heart for my entire life to that point.

I was completely devastated by her passing, even though I knew it was imminent. One can never be truly prepared for the death of a loved one.

I had a dream about her last night. I've been dreaming of her more and more lately. Not sure what that's about.

I still miss her.

On the first anniversary of her death, the house I had purchased, with money she'd left to me, flooded. The ground was frozen outside, and it had rained for 3 days solid, and the neighbor's back yard had turned into a lake.

The lake crept closer and closer to the foundation of my house, and, ultimately, into the window wells. One of the windows gave way, and my basement became a lake of freezing cold water, fed by a waterfall. The sump pump was useless in a situation like this.

The waterfall broke through in the corner of the basement where all of the as-yet still packed boxes were stored. All of my mementos, year books, scrap books, photos...as well as stereo equipment, all of my record albums (I had a huge collection), musical instruments, and a futon couch, were down there, waiting to be unpacked..

All of it was ruined...completely ruined.

Funny how we'd managed to move and unpack the boxes that contained my ex husband's similarly precious items. All of his things escaped the deluge.

Anyway, somewhere in a box of keepsakes that was destroyed, was my Grandma's journal of her trip on the train out west to go to the San Francisco World's Fair.
This item had been so precious to me, and now it was gone....like her.

I remembered what it looked like.
What it smelled like.
In the immature, rounded hand of a teen, she'd written with the enthusiasm and excitement of a young person discovering a whole new world.

I will never forget that she wrote passages in that journal about seeing her first automobile, and passing an Indian camp, tee pee's and all.

It really was a new world for her, and for many, in 1915.

She used to tell me about her father's livery business back home in Mine LaMotte, Missouri. She and her mother, and some of her dozen or so siblings, would take one of the horses, and one of the carts, and go out into "the country" to pick dew berries in the summer.

They could do that without being arrested, in those days.

She told me of the room in the house where the loom was, where Mother made rugs. She told me that the oaken chest, which now sits in my bedroom, was "100 years old when I was born! It was just always there, in the house, with the bowl and pitcher on it."

When I use lemon oil on the chest, I think about that.

Because of her, I have a different appreciation for how things change in a life time. I used to use her as my measure, when I'd hear things about "this day in history."

Since she was born in 1900, it was easy to calculate her age on a given historical day. And it was easy to project my imagination, using my growing years, into what it might have been like to be her age, at such and such a time.

Amazing.

I will always remember her, and, since my eyes look just like hers did, I hope that I will always view the world with wonder, and that I will always appreciate whatever experiences come my way. Even the difficult ones.