granny

Music: For Against: Coalesced (2002)

Today I am thinking about my grandmother a lot; I miss her. Sundays are usually reserved for telephoning my mother; we catch up on each other and make plans. Sometimes I phoned my grandmother, but that was many years ago (she cannot hold up the phone today). I asked after my grandmother today, who has been in a nursing home since February. My mother said that she was sad because yesterday Granny didn't know who she was. "I hate seeing her like this," my mom said, "it's not mama." Granny has her good days and her bad days. We are all fortunate that on her good days she seems at peace and happy at the home. I bought her a radio for some of her favorite music, Floyd Kramer and gospel.

Her full maiden name is Opal Geannette Gresham, and she was born in 1920 in Centerville, Georgia. She grew up in a little brown house on Annistown Road, near a gas station but surrounded by acre upon acre of farmland. They were tobacco and cotton farmers for many generations. They did not own slaves. They had lots of children instead. My grandmother had five brothers and sisters. All of them have died except for Granny and my great uncle Morris. They have skin cancer routinely removed from their faces and hands (we didn't know about the ozone trouble in the 30s).

I remember taking this grayscaled photograph at a diner two Christmases ago. For almost a decade it was my and Granny's tradition to go to Waffle House when I came home. We both love the Waffle House. But then she had her falls and strokes, starting in 2004. I said, two years ago, that I wanted to do as we usually did, but my mother and aunt wouldn't let me take Granny out alone, so the whole immediate family went. It wasn't the same, because Granny wouldn't talk freely. She always did when it was just me and her. She misses her "wheels."

When my uncle died this past June, the funeral was not pleasant. What was even more upsetting than the funeral, though, was seeing Granny in the nursing home.

Mortality is a total mindfuck.