This is me and my brother with my Grandmother Gray. And Ian, but you can’t see him because none of us had met him yet. This is February, 2007, and we were celebrating my grandmother’s 90th birthday. February, near lake Erie, with snow on the ground. But I found shamrocks… I remember I taped them to a note I wrote to Grandma about them. Shamrocks in the snow… I miss her every day.
My uncle said to my father at my Grandmother’s funeral… “Mom was love.” And I couldn’t respond because that just made me cry harder than I already was. It wasn’t an empty compliment, it was a bald fact. She was love. Don’t get me wrong, she had a temper like anyone else and she could get plenty angry, but, at the end of the day, she was love. It radiated out of her and brightened everyone she met. My son, Ian, reminds me of her every day- his sunny smile and the way he has never met someone who wasn’t instantly a friend are all her. Somehow that bright, shiny ability to see the lovability in everyone has passed itself down to him. I wish that she could have had more time to know him, and I hope that for all of us there is someone in this world who can say, when we are gone, “93 years were not enough.”
She loved the springtime flowers most of all, so I am glad to report that, under the snow that is falling right now, our daffodils are about to open up and shout, “here we are!” and make everyone who sees them want to smile back. Because that’s just how she was. It seems fitting to be waiting for the daffodils today, on her day.
We got to give a little love, have a little hope
Make this world a little better
-Ziggy Marley
Sometime between when I saw him on Christmas Day and when I went to feed and brush him the next morning, sweet Remus passed away. He was almost 18, and he’d been with me through nearly all of my adult life. I unfortunately was home alone with the kids when I found him and I had to lock myself in my room until I got over my crying jag so that Michael and I could tell Ian, together, that Goodbye had come for his Kitty Friend. He took it better than I did, of course, because children always do. I realize that not everyone is a cat person, but even if you despise cats, it’s hard to ignore the fact that 18 years is a long relationship with anything or anyone. And saying goodbye to something you’ve loved for 18 years… well, that’s hard. And it makes you think about things.
Romulus and Remus, together again. RIP sweet kitties.
I remember that when I was in my early twenties I felt as though I was terribly far from both my childhood and from old age. I don’t presume to speak for YOU, but from having talked with other people it seems I was not completely alone in feeling that way. It seemed as though time spread out before me in vast swathes- my life was not yet written, and anything could happen. Anything at all.
And then I had children. Having kids changed my entire relationship with time. Being there through the first few years of their lives made me realize how very fast I am going through those vast swathes of time I once thought lay before me. They also bring back my own childhood so vividly that I sometimes feel as though nothing but a few heartbeats or a breath separates me from either my childhood or from the time when I sincerely hope to find myself “stricken in years.” Ian went from a newborn to a Kindergartener in a blink of the proverbial eye. Suddenly I feel time’s passage like I’m sledding down a 90 degree drop with “OLD AGE” embossed at the bottom, and There Are No Brakes. The thing about time is that there is no getting off this ride. (Unless you’re the Doctor. Which reminds me that I am still ticked off that my DVR did not record the Christmas Special. But never mind.)
Anything can still happen, but what I would like to happen is for me to be strong well into my kids’ adulthood and hopefully well into the lives of THEIR kids. I feel very fortunate that my parents are healthy enough to enjoy my children. I would like my boys, someday, when they have fallen in love and gotten married and become awesome Daddies, to be able to have me pay forward even the smallest part of what Rama and Raba have been to them. I aspire to be a Strong Grandma.
Monday Progress Report:
I will have progress photos for you tomorrow. Sorry, we just didn’t get to it today.
I feel like I should specify here that I’m tracking my TOTAL progress. So when I say + or -, I mean vs. day 1, not since my last progress report. It helps me to keep the big picture in mind, so I don’t get discouraged on weeks where progress is smaller.
Day: 50
The scale has moved: -12 lbs
The inches have changed: -13.5 inches
I feel: Ready to move into week 8 and 2013 STRONGER and LIGHTER. Yes, we can!
I’ve walked: 59.89 miles and counting!
Never used.
I can’t go to a thrift store without thinking of my Grandma Gray. She and I used to go together, and when we couldn’t do that, I’d call her when I got home and tell her everything I had seen. Best of all would be if something I said sparked her remarkable memory and set her to telling me stories. The world seems much smaller without her.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that my grandmother, The Wise and Wonderful Betty Gray, had a sister who died when they were children. That piece of information was just a fact for most of my life. A date on the family tree and a name.
After my grandfather died, Grandma told me about her father throwing himself into Jean’s grave, sobbing that he wanted his daughter back. Jean started to be a little more real to me then. So did my great grandfather. When Jean died of diptheria, she was 9, and my grandmother was six years old. Just a bit more than a year older than Ian is right this minute. She lived 93 years. She raised five children and had 10 grandchildren and three great grandchildren during her lifetime. Part of her never stopped being the six year old girl who saw her sister for the last time.
Now I’m a mom, and I’m seeing some of the family photographs from when my grandmother and her sisters were children for the first time. I certainly saw a lot of family photos when I visited Erie, but I’d never seen these. They add a whole other dimension to this story. Because my kids take after these madcap Lynch girls by quite a bit. I see expressions and attitudes in these photos taken 100 years ago and they are the same I see every day. The haircuts are different, the photo processes were different, but the minds and personalities behind those photos feel so FAMILIAR. In every sense of the word. And Jean and her two little sisters are becoming less abstract. I feel like I’m getting to know my Grandma and my Great Aunt Eileen more- not as they were when I knew them, but as they were before the loss of their sister changed everything.
I look at this face:
and I can’t help but see this:
You can learn more about the Lynch girls on my dad’s site. Start here.
Jenny and her girls (Jean and Betty):
Me and my boys:
When one thinks of one’s “Great Grandmother,” I suppose one naturally tends to think of her as having been elegant. And refined. You know, “old fashioned.” And perhaps a bit… stuffy. I should know better. We are talking, after all, about the woman who raised the Wise and Wonderful Betty Gray. Who raised my father. Who… well, you see where this is going, right? The family Zydeco Dance Band had to come from SOMEWHERE. (What’s our Family Zydeco Dance band? Three dudes, a cowbell, and a kazoo. Need I say more?)
Thanks to my dad and my uncle, Barry, I can tell you that THIS is what I should be thinking of when I think “Great Grandmother.”
Maybe it’s a fluke. Ok. Here she is with my great grandfather:
Oh dear. Well, perhaps she talked him into it. Surely he was occasionally dry and refined.
Or not. I bet they had a family Zydeco Dance band, too. Although they had three daughters, so I suppose they’d have to have been Dudettes.
Total mileage this morning: 1.23 miles
If you are a hard-laughing, kid loving, book reader, today is your day.
If you stand tall and speak firmly though tears may fall, today is your day.
If you defend your family fiercely, today is your day.
If you have faced adversity and carried on, today is your day.
If you are always absolutely and indubitably yourself, today is your day.
Happy Birthday to the Wise and Wonderful Betty Gray. In your honor, I celebrate you and all the funny, strong, wise, irrepressible, intelligent, caring, WONDERFUL women I know.
From the family archive. (Thanks, Uncle Barry.) You are looking at the Wise and Wonderful Betty Gray, back when she was the Wonderful Betty Lynch. Along with her sisters, Jean and Eileen.
If I’d known how very much I’d someday want my children to feel like they knew her, I’d have spent several weeks with her writing her childhood as a children’s book. I’d still like to do that, but it would have been more fun to collaborate with her.
I was looking for something else entirely when I happened upon this note I made, dated 10/6/2006:
Grandma said, “don’t worry about getting a big tummy. Just let it hang out. When I was young, we tried to hide everything, which to my mind is kind of stupid.”
(This, obviously, was in response to the news that the person we now know as Ian would be arriving the following summer.)