South City Confidential

Her Story

My grandma died last Thursday night.

I had school in Minnesota on Friday and Saturday, and the visitation was not until Monday, so we drove through the snow on Monday morning to get to rural southeastern Iowa, where the cattle were huddled together in the snow-covered fields.

My grandma was 92 years old. The visitation and funeral was unremarkable; family members I had not seen in years and years, church ladies saying goodbye to one of their own, old neighbors from across the county. There was the church lady-catered luncheon, with too many Jello and mayo-based salads to count. There were the requisite plants and flowers sent in memoriam, pictures of her life and our family displayed. One picture caught my eye, something I hadn’t seen before: my grandma and grandpa; sitting at a bar, each with a drink, my grandpa in his Army uniform. The souvenir photo was from Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Bar and Cocktail Lounge in New York, taken in 1946.  It cost $1.

My grandma didn’t marry my grandpa until she was 29, older than most women of her generation. She didn’t have my Aunt Pat until she was 35. She had my Aunt Barb when she was 46. 46! My Aunt Barb is 46 now, and her daughters are 18 and 19. I can’t imagine her having a newborn right now, but my grandma, in the 1960′s, was raising a toddler alongside teens.

She was almost 63 when I was born, her first grandchild. In my mind and my memories, she’s always been a grandma, always an “old lady”, who played cards with me at the dining room table or took me with her to the beauty parlor to get her hair set. But as I half-listened to the minister spout the same religious ideas used to comfort people when others die, I thought that picture of my grandma and grandpa in New York City. For a short while, my grandma lived and worked there. She left tiny Montezuma and went and lived in New York City before she moved back to Iowa.

She was a woman who had cocktails during a night out in New York City.

What was it like for her? What did she do while she was there? What kind of life did she have in New York City? Why did she come back? Did she think of her time there when she spent the rest of her life in towns of less than a thousand people?

The narrative I have in my head about my grandma’s life is only part of the story. There are more. Some parts she might have told me had I asked; others probably only lived on her her narrative, the one inside her head. I can only speculate as to my grandma’s own narrative, whether or not she was happy, what she struggled with, what she celebrated, what kept her going. I can probably only piece together bits of other people’s narrative to get a glimpse into the parts of her I didn’t know.

My grandma was in a nursing home when she died. She had been there for a few years, since her health rapidly deteriorated after my grandpa’s death. She was in the hospital in Iowa City late last year; we thought she would die then. I saw her there, and she knew who I was and was able to muse over photographs I showed her of my brother’s wedding and of she and I together at my aunt’s retirement party. But when Chris and I stopped to see her over Christmas, she was falling asleep and asked us to go after five minutes. At the end, she didn’t want to see anyone, rolling over in her bed, turning her back to her children, her minister, and the other visitors.

This imagery was sad to me, the idea of her dying alone, eschewing human contact in her final days. But I think she was facing the end in the way she wanted to. I don’t know why she chose that, but I believe that it was what she wanted and what she could control: living the final chapter of her private narrative.

I took the picture of my grandparents in New York City, before they were grandparents or even parents. It reminds me that we’re all made up of many, many stories.

KBO posted this article under family, life on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 10:59 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site.