Good-Bye Grandma

On Tuesday morning, Grandma Mary died. I had gone to see her Monday morning after my mother and brother told me she was on her last moments. Mom had spent all night praying by her bed, doing the right thing in the end, thank God, or she'd be a mess right now. I tried to wake her but she kept moaning MaMa...which I guess is very common when people are passing.

She was a shadow of herself. Physically, there was almost nothing left.

Grandma always used to bring me white tennis shoe Keds. In 6th grade, she was wearing a pair and I complimented her. They were just coming in style and after that, she'd bring me a pair every six months or so. There were many versions of Grandma, this shoe bearing version was generous and quirky. The version my Mom always shared as a memory from her childhood was larger than life, with stories about her emotional and physical abuse. These are things she has apologized for in recent years, but I guess for my Mom, it was too little, too late.

There was Grandma who had plastic and sheets on her living room furniture and a silver Christmas tree, neither of which we were allowed to touch. Her house was always spotless but had stuff I thought was cool like a heated floor, a 1960's bar lamp on the kitchen bar and pendant lights straight from 1972. Everything had a very distinct place and as a kid, you knew not to mess with it. She had a bear in her guest room that had political buttons from the 1950's and 60's, which I was much in awe of. She would stock Coke and Cappicola for me and Carolyn when we came to visit and we had very distinct cups...red for me, yellow for her. She was not the kind of Grandma that would scoop you up and kiss you, but remind you to take your shoes off at the door. But those cups just for us made us feel important. She would talk to us like we had something to say, a traditionalist in the art of conversation and full of formal manners.

When her long time companion Jerry died in 2004, she had just had an amputation so she couldn't live on her own and she first went to live with my Uncle Bob, my Godfather, in Ohio. That hurt Mom's feelings, but a year later she ended up coming back after a feud with him and my Aunt Kathy (he died in 2009, not speaking to my grandmother or my mom...I still don't understand it all).

Grandma would have a way of saying mean things in causal conversation, especially when she had a cocktail (Black Velvet with a splash of water). She drank a lot for many years. But I didn't see that side too often because I saw her early in the day and when she lived with my parents, I didn't spend a lot of time at their house.

Jerry would have a beer with Dad and they got along pretty good, but I always knew from so many stories that she had looked down on my Dad. Something in recent years I think she learned a lesson about. My Dad may have come from the wrong side of the tracks, but she was smart enough to know he was the one driving her around while they lived together! On Thanksgiving, she told me he was gone too soon. I don't know how much she meant it, but it was nice to hear her acknowledge that my Dad was something special. One of my biggest problems with her for many years was how she acted like Dad wasn't good enough.

I gave away many things in 2007 but some of the things I kept were from her. She had bestowed her possessions to her grandchildren, here and there. The Christmas Spode is my favorite, some pieces decades old when she started collecting it. When I was younger, she would tell me someday it would be mine. It feels like something special and a piece of my family history.

Years ago, I wrote her a letter when I was a teenager, a silly letter about something I don't even remember I think I wanted to know more about my Grandpa Samuel, whom my mother gave me a photo of as a little girl, telling me that he would look out for me. She wrote me back telling me all about her career during WWII and how hard it was to be a widow, sending me photos of her in her office job during the war. She was elegant and Italian (something she resented...she unfortunately hated the "dark" in our genes). My grandfather died in 1951, when my mom was two, something none of the family seemed to recover from.

This morning I told my mother that her death did not give her the closure she thought it would. I am not my mother and I cannot be in her shoes. I can be in mine. Mary DiGuardi had many faults and a hard side, but she always managed to make me feel special. So maybe I was a favorite, as my siblings don't seem to agree and my two cousins haven't spoken to her in years. I just want to remember the good she had to offer, though it does not cancel out her faults. She won't be forgotten. I told her I drink out her stemware regularly and think of her, something that seemed to comfort her. And me, too.