My grandmother didn't want a funeral. That is what my mom said. And really I can imagine her saying that. She was a "don't make a fuss over me" kind of a woman. I can see her looking at my mom in the eye, with her "don't mess with me, I'm still your mother" look and saying, "Judith Irene, (she always used my mom's middle name when she wanted to make a point) I don't want a funeral when I'm gone." And so, one day, she was just gone. There wasn't a funeral, or an article in the newspaper, or little card with oil-painted Jesus on it with her birthday and death on it. Nothing. Just the last of her few possessions she hadn't already given to us, packed into a couple of cardboard boxes. I am embarrassed to say that I don't even remember the exact day she died. Just that she was 94 and she told me she was ready to go.
The last time I saw her was in the dim room she shared in a nursing home. She had lived in the house my mother grew up in until she was 89. The last 5 years she had spent in a retirement living home. And now, this was her last stop. With each move, the treasures she took with her became fewer and fewer. Now she had one shelf on the wall next to her bed lined with pictures of my mother, my late grandfather and my brother and me. She told me she was tired. She was ready to go.
That was ten years ago--she died right after my son was born--and still I am left feeling that we should have done something. My kids rabbit died and we had a funeral in the backyard--
And even saying that I realize it wouldn't be for her--but for me. To say goodbye.
The most vivid, wonderful, happy, normal childhood memories I have are of my grandmother. I called her Baba (the Yugoslavian for grandma) and everything about her was magical and mysterious to me. She was the daughter of immigrants, one of five children, twice a widow, a nurse. She was from a different time, when they used words like Chesterfield (sofa) and Highboy (type of dresser) and when you had your hair washed and set just twice a month. She never owned a dishwasher and still had a washboard she used to scrub clothes in the washbasin on her back porch. She used foreign words like "yetti" (eat) and "zube" (teeth). Her skin was baby soft and wrinkled as a prune, sprinkled with age spots--but I loved they way it felt and smelled--like tea rose lotion and Oil of Olay. Her once brown eyes turned blue-grey with cataracts but I still thought she was beautiful.
I spent almost a month alone with her each summer. She lived in a small, nowhere town that was in a literal time-warp. No movie theater, no toy store, no shopping besides the one Thrifty Drug store. The heat in the summer could be so unbearable that you didn't dare go outside until after dinner--and never without shoes. (Even now, if we have one of those blanket hot days, when the air feels heavy and still--I think of those summers.) There were few kids my age in the neighborhood--and yet, I loved to go and just be with her.
Her house was filled with treasures. They probably weren't worth anything but I can still see each one--in it's place. A set of three Siamese porcelain kittens, each posed differently--sat in a clear glass box on her television. The tiny stork figurine, whose long white neck and small head, bobbed up and down when you touched it. Her hand painted tea cups in the window and the piece of wood my grandfather had once found that looked like a sparrows head. Her golden pill box with it's blue-flowered marbled top, sat in the center of the kitchen table, next to the little ceramic turtle filled with saccharin for her coffee.
We did normal, everyday things together. She taught me to thread a needle and sew a straight stitch by hand and how to make a bed with "hospital corners". She showed me how to measure out dry ingredients for cookies and told me, "never double a recipe". She taught me to play Chinese checkers and took me to garage sales.
I put on great performances for her and her friends (I would never do this at home in front of my brother) and she helped me set up a "restaurant" complete with menus in her kitchen.
She'd tuck me in at night, hold my face with both her hands and say, "sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite".
For me it was a safe place. Free from the underlying turmoil in my own house. Here I could be a child--it was all I was expected to be.
