Arrivals and Departures

I'm going home soon. Not permanently, but it's unexpected. I wanted to go home for Thanksgiving to see my new nephew, as well as my new god-nephew (?), and all the other loved ones (and their seemingly endless clutch of babies) I've been missing of late. I thought it would be nice to see the fam for Turkey Day instead of Christmas for a change. Pay a visit to Grandma and Granny.

But it costs a fortune, and I had decided to use my dwindling savings to fix up my place.

But I'm not anymore. I'm going home next month.

My grandma died this weekend.

I feel like I should pay tribute to her, to her life and all, but its hard. Hard because I've always tried to be honest in this blog, and the kind of platitudes that people resort to when a loved one dies have always seemed a bit insulting to me, like sugar-coating the dead before we bury them.

I loved my grandma, but grandma wasn't an easy person to love. She had quirks the size of the Midwest prairies she grew up on. Big quirks, quirks like the Great Plains, like Montana, like Madonna's ego. Somehow at least some of these could be both endearing and annoying at the same time. Like hearing "We used to call it Lost Wages" at least three times everytime Vegas came up in a conversation.

Growing up during the Great Depression molded her into quite possibly the cheapest person I've ever met. She'd dole out spoiled food to her grandkids rather than let the leftovers "go to waste", leading to several cases of "grandma flu", and more than once I received a "whole roll of pennies" or some random doodad she'd found in the closet from her as a birthday or Christmas gift. She was obsessed with saving anything and everything she thought might be of use or value someday. Old food containers, scraps of paper, little bits of everything (in the mid 80's during the worst of the "Just Say No" drug hysteria I found a baggie containing tiny nubs of chalk that my grandmother had saved, and convinced it was crack, hid it in her closet before tearfully explaining to my parents that grandma was a crack-head...god I was a dumb kid). She'd save money on postage by slipping obituaries of people my mom knew into mom's birthday or Christmas cards, making the opening of such an exercise akin to emotional Russian roulette.

To be honest though, that was the least of my troubles with her. The thing that constantly troubled me about my grandma was her bewildering racism. Grandma didn't like immigrants see. At least not "brown" ones. The hypocrisy of it was what drove me nuts. Grandma was the child of immigrants, an immigrant herself, and yet she heaped scorn on others who came to the States for the self-same reasons as her parents. She and my late grandfather were members of the "Sons of Norway" even though grandpa was Swedish, and she was intensely proud, or as intense as she ever got, of her Scandinavian heritage, slipping bits of Norwegian (or was it Swedish?) into her speech, and trying to get us kids to eat lutefisk. Yet she complained bitterly about the US being "taken over by Mexicans" who "always want to speak Spanish". I never could figure it out.

In my early teens I'd go over the mountains to Yakima to "help out" sometimes in the summers. Say what you like about my grandparents, but grandma did keep a spotless home. I know. I had to help her clean it. Her homes were always small and ordered and clean, and yet somehow lacking in character and warmth. Empty somehow, and cut off from the world.

And forgive me for saying it, but I often thought they reflected grandma's psyche, a world of limits and borders, traditions, conventions, and as echoingly empty as an abandoned grain silo.

I always wondered what she thought of my decision to become an immigrant myself. She'd probably have approved, but only because I went somewhere she could easily confuse with her beloved Scandinavia.

But I never got to find out. Grandma didn't have in-depth conversations with her grandkids, and as my move to Iceland more or less coincided with the onset of her Alzheimer's, she hardly remembered who I was most of the time, aside from her sneaking suspicion that I was "stealing her shoes".

The last time I was home, I skipped an opportunity to go visit her at the care-home she'd been at the last few years, after she got too confused for my mom to take care of her at home.

I regret that now. Bitterly.

My grandma may have been a long way from perfect, and she may have bugged the hell out of me from time to time, but she was my grandma, my mother's mother. She was blood. For all her foibles and failings, she was in her heart a good person, and I let distance and illness cloud that fact from my mind.

I love her.

Loved her.

The past tense can be such a sad and final thing. I've had to go back and put things in past tense the whole time I've been writing this.

So I'm going home to be with my family, in mourning and bittersweet celebration. Grandma may not be with us anymore physically, but she'd wandered away a long time ago in her mind. Maybe now she's whole again. I hope so. I want her happy wherever she is.

Goodbye Grandma. Be at peace.

Oh, oofta! I'm crying again...