A year ago today Grandmother Edith, Dad/Steve's mother passed away. She had a pretty bad stroke a few weeks prior and was ailing so we were expecting it. She died in her sleep. She was 96 years old. Grandma had outlived a lot of people she probably never thought she would: her son, a niece (my mother - Mom and Dad were cousins!), a great-niece, a grandson, all her older relatives and all of her friends and peers. Of all the loss our family experienced over the last few years, hers was the only one that made any sense to us. She was old and ailing. She had been ready. And ready for years! Every time I say her for the last 15 years of her life she would say, "Well, I'm old and will probably die soon so wont see you again...."
We have a white gene in the family, so many of the women get white hair early and Grandma had all white hair very early, I think it was by her mid to late thirties. Basically my entire life she looked the same. A teeny little old lady with white hair who was feisty as hell, loved birds and dogs and reading, and always drove Volkswagen's. She was raised on our family ranch in Eastern Oregon outside of Huntington and lived a good part of her life on it as did my Aunt and my father when they were little. It was from this old property that Dad was returning from when he went off the old river road into the Snake River. While some of us from a younger generation have fear and resentment towards that land, it is inexplicably interwoven into our families history. Grandmas ashes are down there, and some day Dad's will be too.
Despite being raised in the literal middle of no where all three girls, Grandma Edith and her two older sisters, Gertrude and Mary (who is also my great grandmother on my mothers paternal side), were sent off to college and were well educated. Grandma went to Standford and lived in the Bay Area when the Golden Gate Bridge was first opened. Can you imagine? She once told me a story about walking across it with her little nephew Bill who was Mary's son (and my some day maternal grandfather). I just think of the world she came from and all that she saw or was aware of and experienced. I mean, she was born before women could even vote!
Most of the pictures I have of Grandma are of her after her hair has gone all white. There is something I really admire about her having never dyed her hair, that she just embraced it. I get a real kick out of older pictures of her though, as a young woman and most definitely when she was a child. She was much younger than her two sisters and there are way more pictures of her as a baby than you'd expect from that time. I love to look at these pictures and see the little girl she was. I can recognize her even though the baby her was so different looking than the grandmother I saw. She loved nature and animals and reading even then. But you also see this youthfulness and playfulness that was much harder to find later on. She had the classic snarky wit that runs in the family that was obviously very well developed by time I popped into the world. In these pictures you see she started out just like the rest of us and then shaped by the world she lived in.
Anyway, I miss my grandmother even though she was by far the most ready to leave us. On the day she died my Aunt emailed us since we were all aware it was coming. That same day one of my good friends in New York gave birth to her first child, a little girl she named Lauren. At the time I had a job that I was not allowed to check personal email during the day and I had not yet invested in a "smart phone" so it was not till late in the day when I checked and both emails, Grandma's death and Lauren's birth announcement were side by side. I thought it was very fitting and something Grandma would have liked very much.
