A Tribute to My Grandma

My 89-year-old grandma passed away last week. As we talked about her life and began the process of cleaning out her house, I was amazed by the disciplines that she cultivated in her life and filled with the desire to emulate those disciplines.

She had an amazing work ethic. Of course, I never knew my grandma when she was young. She was the second of ten kids. She was born in 1925, which means that most of her childhood was in the midst of the Great Depression. Her father was confined to a wheelchair, so she grew up in poverty. I really don't know how they made money or how their standard of living compared to those around them, but I can't imagine that my grandma ever knew much besides hard work.What I did see firsthand was the Christmas dinner my grandma prepared for us in December just a few weeks before she died in February. She was planning her dishes carefully so she could do as much ahead of time as possible. She knew her limits and knew that any activity would exhaust her. That exhaustion, though, did not stop her from working in the days leading up to Christmas to prepare a wonderful meal for us. She told me over and over to exercise everyday, and her good health throughout her long life was certainly a testimony to the power of exercise.

As we went through closets, we found all her things very well-cared for. Her clothes were hung carefully with cedar rings on the hangers. She had potpourri in her drawers. Her shoes were stowed in labeled boxes. Her sewing supplies were all organized in her sewing desk. Her crochet magazines were in wire racks on the inside of a closet drawer. She had a few small junk drawers, but for the most part, she took great care in preserving her possessions. It was evident that she did not take all that she had accumulated for granted but rather cherished all that she had worked so hard to acquire.

One of my current interests is learning how to manage a house. In Cheryl Mendelson's book, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, she opens her tome on housekeeping with her philosophy on keeping a home. She writes that housekeeping "makes your home alive, ... turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms, the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else." My grandma's care of her home went beyond simply preserving possessions. As I went from room to room, I could feel my grandma's "ways and rhythms." They were in everything from the beautiful copper print of the Last Supper hanging above the refrigerator to the clippings of encouraging verses and poetry taped above the phone book to the boxes and boxes of cards she had received throughout the years. Her home reflected her values. Her home was her haven and also a welcoming place to anyone who visited. When I got back home, I immediately started cleaning out closets, organizing, and planning ways to rearrange the furniture so that my home could more effectively reflect my "ways and rhythms."

Both of my parents are engineers, and I definitely inherited their analytical, logical approach to the world. My grandma, for the most part, lived at the other end of the spectrum. She had "feelings" about things that the rest of my family mostly dismissed as unfounded and irrational. You never knew if her conversations would include rants about Catholics, Asians, or some other archaic prejudice or insight into profound spiritual truths. More than once, she managed to cut right to the heart of a situation that the rest of my family seemed blind to. I wish she would have found a church home that would have helped her to listen to her intuition and use it in service to God's work, rather than too often dismissing her as a crazy, old woman. Regardless, I don't know what I will do without her wisdom and insight that she shared both in conversation when we visited and in her frequent cards and letters. I do know that I want to follow her example and cultivate whatever abilities I have to listen to my intuition.

Even more than her intuition, though, I want to follow her example of faith. I know she struggled with her fear of death. I often think about her experience with loss. She lost a younger brother at age 7 and a younger sister a few years later (age 11, I think) to scarlet fever. Her fiance was killed in World War II. Her younger son (my dad's brother) died at the age of 19 in a car accident. I can't imagine how deeply each of those losses must have affected her life. When I was in college, though, I was visiting, and we stayed up late one night talking and she told me how afraid she was of death. That surprised me because I thought that old people were all prepared to die, especially someone like my grandma who had come face to face with death so many times. But she was terrified! When my grandpa died, though, she was with him and saw his whole demeanor transformed in a moment from the agony of the last stages of cancer to a look of deep peace. Every time that I visited after that, she always wanted to talk about how real and deep is the love of God. Instead of growing bitter or withdrawn, she seemed so at peace and blessed. I will miss the richness of her faith.

The week of the funeral was a whirlwind of activity, and we had to come back sooner than expected because of the weather, so I don't feel like I have really had the time to process the loss of my grandma. These few thoughts are some of the things that struck me immediately. I expect that I will continue to miss her and grieve her loss in the days to come, but I look forward to the Lord's Day when all will be well.