Chicken Soup for the Grandma's Soul (12 page)

One night we got the long distance call from Iowa. Gramma's condition was getting worse. I had to accept the reality, then, that writing her song would take a long, long time—perhaps longer than Gramma could wait. Still, I could not let go of my goal.

Finally I shared it and my frustration with my mom. She sat beside me on the piano bench and wrapped her arms around me, speaking with comfort and wisdom—with words I would have expected to hear from my wise gramma Fritz.

“Maybe it isn't the music you're afraid to let go. Maybe it's Great-Gramma.”

She was right. I didn't want to let go of Gramma. As long as I was hanging on to my goal, I felt like I was hanging on to her.

That night in bed I thought about what Mom had said and realized I would never have to give up Gramma or the wonderful gifts she had given me. Hers was a spirit that would live forever. She was a special blessing, and blessings never really die. The fear of losing her vanished. I fell asleep remembering Gramma telling me how she danced when she was young. She and her friends never tired, they just kept dancing.

Now I sit next to the piano with my unfinished goal in my hand. Dance, Little Anna, dance. You have helped me to be free.

Angela Thieman-Dino
Age fifteen

Love and Water

W
oman is the salvation or the destruction of
the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of
her mantle.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Mama died just days before my eleventh birthday, and my destiny careened dramatically from snug to looseended. Overnight, my childhood vanished. In those coming months Dad met Dot at work and began seeing her regularly. A year later, they married.

So much. So quickly. Another woman moving into our house stirred anew my still-fresh memories of Mama. At the same time, uninitiated Dot inherited a brood of three children, ages five, eight and eleven.

When alone, I listened to an old recording of “You'll Never Walk Alone,” and I was convinced my mama sang those words to me from the other side. Yet, in moments of grief, I wondered,
How can she walk with me now?
My child's heart yearned for a mother's touch.

“Do you want the kids to call you ‘Mama'?” Dad asked Dot one day. Something in me wanted her to say, “Yes.”

Dot looked troubled for long moments, then said, “No. That wouldn't be right.”

The
no
felt like a physical blow.
Blood's thicker'n water,
came my grandma's favorite litany. I'd not, until that very moment, grasped its meaning. My stepmother's answer seemed proof that blood
was
thicker, that I was merely Daddy's baggage—proof that, to her, despite the fact that she introduced me as “my daughter,” I was biologically not.

I was of the
water.
So I distanced myself.

My sulky aloofness hid a deep, deep need for acceptance. Yet, no matter how churlish I became, Dot never hurt me with harsh words. Ours was, in those trying days, a quiet, bewildered quest for harmony.

After all, we were stuck with each other. She had no more choice than I.

I visited Mama's grave every chance I got, to talk things over with her. I never carried flowers because fresh arrangements always nestled lovingly against the headstone, put there, no doubt, by Daddy.

Then, in my fourteenth year, I came in from school one day and saw my newborn baby brother, Michael. I hovered over the bassinet, gently stroking the velvety skin as tiny fingers grasped mine and drew them to the little mouth. I dissolved into pure, maternal mush. Dot, still in her hospital housecoat, stood beside me.

In that moment, our gazes locked in wonder. “Can I hold him?”

She lifted him and placed him in my arms.

In a heartbeat, that tiny bundle snapped us together.

“Like your new coat?” Dot asked that Christmas as I pulled the beautiful pimento-red topper from the gift package and tried it over my new wool sweater and skirt.

In short months, Dot had become my best friend.

At Grandma's house one Sunday, I overheard her tell my aunt Annie Mary, “I told James I didn't think it was right to force the kids to call me Mama. Irene will always be Mama to them. That's only right.”

So that's why she'd said no.

Or was it?
Blood's thicker'n water.
Was Grandma right? Was that always true in matters pertaining to familial loyalty? I shrugged uneasily, telling myself that it didn't matter anyway.

Over the years, Dot embraced my husband, Lee, as “son,” soothed me through three childbirths, and afterward spent weeks with me, caring and seeing to my family's needs. While grandmothering my children, she birthed three of her own, giving me two brothers and a sister. How special our children felt, growing up together, sharing unforgettable holidays like siblings.

In 1974, Lee and I lived two hundred miles away when a tragic accident claimed our eleven-year-old Angie. By nightfall, Dot was there, holding me. She was utterly heartbroken.

I moved bleakly through the funeral's aftermath, secretly wanting to die. Every Friday evening, I dully watched Dot's little VW pull into my driveway. “Daddy can't come. He has to work,” she'd say. After leaving work, she drove four hours nonstop to be with me each weekend, a long trek that continued for three months.

During those visits, she walked with me to the cemetery, held my hand and wept with me. If I didn't feel like talking, she was quiet. If I talked, she listened. She was so
there
that, when I despaired, she single-handedly shouldered my anguish.

Soon, I waited at the door on Fridays. Slowly, life seeped into me again.

Nearly twenty years later, Dad's sudden auto accident death yanked the earth from beneath me and again I lapsed into shock, inconsolable. My first reaction was,
I
need to be with Dot, my family.

Then, for the first time since adolescence, a cold, irrational fear blasted me with the force of TNT. Dad, my genetic link, gone. I'd grown so secure with the Daddy-and-Dot alliance through the years that I'd simply taken family solidarity for granted. Now with Dad's abrupt departure, the chasm he left loomed murky and frightening.

Had Dad,
I wondered,
been the glue? Was glue genetic, after
all?

Terrifying thoughts spiraled through my mind as Lee drove me to join relatives.

Will I lose my family?
The peril of that jolted me to the core.

“Blood's thicker'n water.”

If Grandma felt that way, couldn't Dot feel that way, too, just a little bit? The small child inside my adult body wailed and howled forlornly. It was in this frame of mind that I entered Dot's house after the accident.

Dot's house. Not Dad's and Dot's house anymore.

Would Daddy's void change her? She loved me, yes, but suddenly I felt keenly DNA-stripped, the stepchild of folklore. A sea of familiar faces filled the den. Yet, standing in the midst of them all, I felt utterly alone.

“Susie!” Dot's voice rang out, and through a blur I watched her sail like a porpoise to me. “I'm so sorry about Daddy, honey,” she murmured and gathered me into her arms.

Terror scattered like startled ravens.

What she said next took my breath. She looked me in the eye and said gently, “He's with your mama now.”

I snuffled and gazed into her kind face. “He always put flowers on Mama's grave. . . .”

She looked puzzled, then smiled sadly. “No, honey, he didn't put the flowers on her grave.”

“Then who . . . ?”

She looked uncomfortable. Then she leveled her gaze with mine. “I did.”

“You?” I asked, astonished. “All those years?” She nodded, then wrapped me in her arms again.

Truth smacked me broadside.
Blood is part water.
Grandma just didn't get it.

With love blending them, you can't tell one from the other.

I asked Dot recently, “Isn't it time I started calling you Mom?”

She smiled and blushed. Then I thought I saw tears spring in her eyes.

“Know what I think?” I said, putting my arms around her. “I think Mama's looking down at us from heaven, rejoicing that you've taken such good care of us, grandmothering my children, doing all the things she'd have done if she'd been here. I think she's saying, ‘Go ahead, Susie, call her
Mom
.” I hesitated, suddenly uncertain. “Is that okay?”

In a choked voice, she replied, “I would consider it an honor.”

Mama's song to me was true: I do not walk alone.

Mom
walks with me.

Emily Sue Harvey

The Perspective of a Pansy

W
hat we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom
of past ages.

Henry Ward Beecher

In Atlanta we have the luxury of planting pansies in the fall and viewing their curious faces all winter long. That is how my grandma described their blooms, as faces. She was right. If you look into a pansy's velvet petals you can see its eager expression peeking out at you. It was my grandmother's love for this flower that drew me to
Viola
tricolor hortensis
when I was a little girl. My favorites were the white petals with purple centers, or “faces.” They remain my favorite flowers today.

Since pansies are annuals, last year's flowers had long since died and been pulled from the ground, never to be seen again. I hadn't taken the time to plant even one flat of pansy seedlings that fall. Actually, I hadn't found the time to do much of anything but work since September. My job had become especially demanding due to a project that required me to fly weekly to Washington, DC. Between airports, delayed flights, cancellations, taxicabs, trains and countless hotel rooms, I hadn't spent enough time with my husband, hadn't returned phone calls from my parents, hadn't sent birthday cards to my dearest friends, hadn't taken the necessary time to come to terms with the death of my grandma and certainly hadn't made time to put pansies in the ground.

Perhaps by skipping the whole pansy planting process that autumn I was putting off facing the reality that Grandma, the only grandparent I had ever known, had died.

My connection between her and the flowers was so strong. I told myself I was too busy for gardening so many times that I convinced myself it was true.

As I drove home from the airport one chilly November evening, I was overwhelmed by an empty pang in my heart. It had begun as a slight ache and built up to a deep, hollow throb after five straight days of deadlines, lists, conference calls and meetings. I hadn't allowed any time for myself, to read, to visit with friends and family or even to pray. I had tried to ignore this vacuous feeling. I had just kept going and going, like a robot following programmed commands, forgetting about all of the things in life that gave me deeper meaning. The pain was especially great this particular evening due to a canceled flight that delayed my getting home until long after my lonely husband was already in bed.

After fighting eight lanes of stop-and-go traffic for over an hour, caused by what appeared to be a fatal accident, I arrived frazzled and tired in my suburban neighborhood. As I pulled into my driveway, my headlights shone into the empty flowerbeds. I glimpsed something white resting on the ground. I parked my car in the garage and walked around to the front yard to collect what I assumed was a piece of garbage to throw away. But I did not find trash. Instead I found a lone white pansy with a purple face flourishing by itself in a barren bed of pine straw.

The determined flower had fought all odds to spring from a ripped-up root, which is not bred for regrowth, to return another year. It didn't seem possible, and maybe it wasn't. Yet here was a perfect pansy grinning at me and asking me from its remarkable face why I too couldn't break through the dirt and let myself bloom.

Touching that flower, I knew this was Grandma's way of letting me know that although she had left this earth, she wasn't really gone. Just like the pansy that had been pulled from the soil yet was still blossoming, my grandmother's spirit would always flourish inside my heart. I sighed, recalling that Grandma would have never put work first. Her family and friends were the priorities in her world. She didn't know the meaning of timetables or deadlines. Although her life was simple, she was always happy and saw only the good in others and the beauty in the world around her.

It was time to open my heart and my eyes to the important things around me, to fill up the empty hole inside me with the nourishment that only God, family and friends could give me. Work could wait. Life, as the pansy showed me, could not.

Laura L. Smith

Red and White Carnations

This was the first Mother's Day since Grandmother passed away. I dreaded going to church and seeing families sit together with their moms. I hated being in church alone, and especially today I hated admitting to myself and others that my mother left and my parents were divorced. I never talked much about it, but I realized everyone in the church knew more about it than I did.