Time with Grandma

I’ve spent every night the last week with Grandma Peck (my dad’s mother) through her journal. I can’t get enough. I must be a nerd because I love reading about lives; especially those of relatives. I thought I knew Grandma. Now I see how different it is to know someone as a child and to really get to know them again as an adult. I only knew her on the surface through a child’s self-centered tunnel vision. Reading her words is like getting a hammer and breaking a dull rock and finding its innards laden with colorful multifaceted treasure-like beauty.

In the beginning I found it quaint and unusual that Grandma wrote the temperature outside at the beginning of each entry along with weather related adjectives such as, “lovely out,” “dismal,” “rainy,” or “blizzardy.” When I told Jeff he said that made the entries better because you could imagine more what the day was like. Hers was an agrarian lifestyle. She lived on a dairy farm most of her life. Weather was important to farmers. As an older lady in her late 70s, I also see there was more time for Grandma to notice the change of the seasons and beautiful sunsets. I don’t take time to notice the weather or appreciate a lovely day. Grandma always did. I’d like to slow down enough to be like that.

Grandma talks incessantly about death. I don’t blame her. She’s staring it in the face. In her entries I find she was a fixture at every viewing and funeral in town. Clipped or torn obituaries from the newspaper are stapled to many pages of her journal. The dead are close friends and family members. She attended more funerals in one month than I have in my whole life. I laughed because she once drove some girlfriends to a funeral. They filled the front and back seats of her brown Chevrolet in corseted primness. As they talked and laughed over each other their bobbling heads, crowned with gray and white bouffants, gave off the scent of pressed dusty roses. All the while Grandma said she secretly prayed she wouldn’t kill everyone in a car accident. She said, “When I go, I want to go alone. I don’t want to take what's left of the gang with me.” After one viewing she said she hoped that when she died they’d make her look as good as they did Mae Smith. I have to say things have never been so grim that I've thought to have a preference for how I’ll look during my viewing. Old ladyhood is a different world.

One entry was hard to read. Grandma’s best friend Eudora died of leukemia. They had been friends through the vicissitudes of 40 years. I’d taken many a car ride with them in earlier entries. In her dark solitude she waxed nostalgic about their closeness and companionship. Getting old is not for sissies! I cry when friends move away. I can’t imagine having everyone die off. Through the darkness I felt the light of Grandma’s magnanimous faith in the afterlife. Though she grew increasingly lonely and fearful of being completely alone and a widow, she never doubted she’d see her friends and relatives again.

I’ve been soothed by reading these experiences. Imagine having someone like a grandma come back from the dead to provide comfort, friendship, and perspective. I’ve been struggling in some ways because my parents are leaving me early. I've spent a lot of time truly wondering about life after death. I feel bolstered by the veracity of Grandma’s perception and faith. Her words are scripture to me. She wrote the scores of BYU games, how she spent a whole day looking for the lost keys my Cousin Shelly thought she left in her house, and about eating too much pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. It’s mundane, uplifting, and wonderful. I can’t wait to give her a hug and kiss her big soft cheek. I’ll thank her for writing it all down for me and becoming a friend in a way that I've needed a friend. Let’s just hope I don’t see her too soon here. I want to live a good long life like she did.

This is Grandma in 1906. I see the gene culprit of Andy's humongous kissable cheeks.