Final Farewells - The Grandmother

So I try to write these things every NYE. I'm a bit late this year, but knowing me, can you really expect anything else?

Thought not.

I'm lucky, I only had three to write about this year, and none of them were people who were a huge part of my life.

I won't say enjoy.

Her name was Norma, and in fourteen years of having her in the grandmother role, I never managed to learn her last name. I feel bad about this, because the dead ask so little of us. With very few exceptions, they only want two things: they want to be found if they haven't already, and they want people to know their names. Her daughter - my stepmama - has had three surnames in the decade and a half that I've known her (and her daughters have yet another one, from their father) and I truly don't know which of them, if any, came from her mom. So Norma's surname could have been Baker, or it could have been Cushing, or it could have been something totally different.

What can I say about this woman? Very little, and I feel bad for that. I have far more to say about my other FFs, and they weren't family. I feel like I should have more to say about a woman who I considered my grandmother, but truth is that I barely knew her. I saw her maybe once a year, some years not at all. I know she was kind to me. I know she was down-to-earth and friendly. I know that when she got the lung cancer diagnosis and they gave her three to six months, she had the stamina and sheer stubbornness to hang on nearly four years.

What I can tell you about is the reaction that her death has brought about in my stepmama, who I AM close to, and who loved her mother dearly. I saw her before Christmas, for the first time in a couple months, and she has quite simply turned gray. Not her hair, but her whole aura. Stepmama is one of the brightest, strongest people I've ever had the pleasure to meet. She's coped with my father's incapacity over the last eighteen months with grace and humor, and while she's looked tired nothing ever dimmed her inner flame until her mother died in the spring of 2010.

For your death - expected as it was - to evoke that kind of reaction in your fifty-year-old daughter, that the pain still shows clearly eight months later...well, to me that says a lot about the kind of person you are.

So here it is, a tribute to a woman that I wish I'd known better. Happily she's never haunted me - I can only assume that her pragmatic nature ensures that she has no unfinished business here. She deserves much better than the little that I can write about her, but if she could hear it she would go out of her way to make sure I know how much she appreciated it, and how perfect it all was (even if it wasn't). Because that's just the kind of person she was.