My grandmother was always old but never aged. She was really old when I was a child.* Later, she went decades without aging a bit, appearing to get younger at times, and then, without warning, she broke her leg and got old again.
Just the other day, she died at ninety-nine years and two months old (we come full circle as we age, and with that comes the counting of months, weeks and even days, hours and minutes). I have a feeling that in ten years I will still think of it as “just the other day” for time is starting to do that to me. Somehow her death came as a surprise. While I knew she was ready, some part of me wondered after all these years, why not expect another ninety-nine or at least one more day? Not that I’d really wish eternity on anyone, but for me there is an expectation of immortality after reaching a certain point. With death comes a retelling of memories for the living. “Remember when she wouldn’t let us go out on the sandbar; when she sent us spelling corrections for our thank you notes; when she won every time that we played Scrabble; when she recited poetry that she learned when she was twelve even the verses in Latin; when she worried about us when no one else would.” There are so many shared memories, many of which took on mythical proportions even as she lived. We all have one about Scrabble since her losses were very few and far between. As for me, I only found victory once her eyesight was so bad that she could no longer see the board. I’m not sure if that counts as winning, but after all of these years of losing, I take what I can. Now, there are the ever emerging stories. Those that I missed while she was living. The one about how she taught the Southern Baptist girls in her Girl Scout troop how to dance; the fact that she never got new false teeth even though her original set never fit properly, resulting in years of her complaining about tough meat; the ways that she mentored and cared for her staff when she managed the bank branch in Beaufort; how she helped prepare Jewish women’s bodies for burial, chevra kadisha I believe is the correct term or maybe that's the name of the people who prepare the bodies. And, finally, there are the stories that were never shared or have been long forgotten. These are the ones she took quietly with her, leaving us only to wonder what quixotry we missed. And, as it goes, my grandmother who once was always old and who now will never age is becoming younger and younger in my memory. *My parents, still in their twenties when I was born, started to get old (in my childhood mind) around thirty years of age. With my parents, I could almost imagine them young. They had parents after all. My grandmother’s mother, Bobo, is woven into my memories but her senility made her more like us children than one of the adults. This made my grandparents the oldest ones of all.
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