My grandmother reached out her loving arms. I yearned to go into them as I had done as a child. Mother’s smile (I called her Mother) radiated an aura of absolute rapture such as I had never seen before. I wanted to go with her to that place that provided such happiness and held no pain. My body wanted to rise and lift toward the white-clad figure. The lights were enticing, and Mother beckoned me to her bosom. My body levitated, but my right hand clutched onto something holding me down. It was as if my husband and three children were an anchor, and I held its cable. As my grandmother summoned and the desire to release my hand from the heavy cordage grew greater, my body floated up, up, up—except for the right hand that held on tightly and refused to let go.
I desired the peace and tranquility that Mother in the billowy clouds offered, but the hand held on, and I dared not loosen it. Even in my unconscious state, I knew that by relaxing a hand muscle for only a second, the blinding pain in my head would be gone and I would join my grandmother in heaven. Yet the hand held on. Mother smiled, letting me know it was okay to hold on as she faded into the clouds.
I heard someone call my name.
Mother? I opened my eyes expecting to see my grandmother.
The lady standing beside my bed was dressed in white, but instead of a gown, she wore a nurse’s uniform. “Welcome back. We thought we were going to lose you there for a while.” She smiled. “Your husband and three children are here. They’ve been waiting for three days for you to come out of that sleep.”
I tried to reach for them, but my right arm would not move. The fingers on that hand would not release their grip on the mattress.
The operation was an apparent success. The shunts drained the fluid in my spinal cord, yet my right arm was paralyzed. Deep within myself, I knew. Perhaps I could never explain it to others, but I knew I had made the choice. I elected to live, and Mother approved.
I also realized that I had the courage to undergo the second corrective surgery to stop the headaches. There was still the danger of death when the surgeon’s knife would cut into my brain, but I knew I could not lose. Not with Mother and her tranquil beam of light waiting on the other side and a precious family, for whom it was worth giving one’s right arm, waiting on earth.
Jean Kinsey
Parting Gifts
Prayer begins where human capacity ends.
Marian Anderson
Paralyzed with fear, I stood in the vacant dining room of a nursing home in Tennessee watching CNN track the approach of a killer.
It was 3 A.M., August 28, 1992. A night-shift attendant was keeping watch beside a wide-screen TV. I had come looking for a glass of water to sustain a vigil of my own, but was captured by a strange irony. Computerized weather maps were tracking Hurricane Andrew’s relentless and deadly assault on the South Florida coast. No power on earth could arrest, avert or deter this category five monster from destroying everything in its path.
Down the hall my ninety-two-year-old grandmother was also fighting a formidable foe. As inescapable as that hurricane, there was no way to slow death or speed it up, we just had to face it . . . together. This would be our final memory—the hardest and the best.
“Mimi” had lived with our family for ten years. She watched our daughter grow up and fascinated her with stories about life on a southern farm at the turn of the twentieth century. She and Leina had been coconspirators, faithful confidantes and pseudo-siblings. It was a rich and rewarding exchange.
At the age of ninety-one, however, Mimi suffered a series of ministrokes that ultimately placed her in a nursing home. After the last major stroke, she couldn’t swallow.
This night, I was feeding her liquids with a syringe, measuring drops as she had once done for me as a premature baby. It was very difficult to see her this way. I had prayed every way I knew how and was almost prayed out.
Then insight spoke. What I needed was a prayer partner— someone to hold me up right then in prayer. Earlier I had sent my family home to rest. There wasn’t a phone in the room, but I knew that God could prompt a heart to pray, so I asked him.
Thirty minutes later, the head nurse was taking vital signs when we heard a commotion outside the door. She slipped out, and through the cracked door I heard her calming one of the residents. A sweet, endearing lady, Miss Minnie was forever getting lost and confused looking for her room. Again the nurse tried to point her toward her room some distance away. Again the protest: “But I need to pray!”
Something propelled me toward the door, and as I opened it, the nurse apologized, “She says she has to pray here . . . now.”
“By all means, let her come in!” My response was automatic as I opened wide the door.
Miss Minnie walked in, not with her usual hesitant shuffle, but with a purposeful stride that took her right to the head of Mimi’s bed. She laid her hand on my grandmother’s head and issued the most beautiful, coherent prayer of healing I had ever heard. When she was done, I knew that whatever happened, everything was going to be all right. I looked into her eyes to thank her. The usual look of doubt and confusion was gone. There was a fire in her eyes, a commanding countenance of faith, purpose and resolve. I later learned she had once been a devoted person of prayer, but the next day she couldn’t even remember that she had prayed.
During the remaining hours that night, Mimi slipped into a coma. I held her hand, asking God to gently shepherd her home, asking him to protect the people in Andrew’s path. At times I wondered if this was how Jacob felt in the Bible the night he wrestled with an angel till dawn. Like Jacob, I was determined to wrest a blessing from this painful ordeal . . . a resurrection moment I could hold in my heart. Jacob got his blessing at dawn. For some reason, 7 A.M. was in my mind.
At 6 A.M. the nurses were unable to record vital signs, but Mimi’s breathing was measured and methodical, as if she were running a race. I sat beside her, stroking her brow and speaking gently. As deliberate as a soldier’s march was each labored breath. She slept on.
Suddenly, on impulse, I pulled back the window curtain and noticed a faint rosy glow on the horizon. I looked back at Mimi and . . . as if arriving . . . she took a deliberate, almost satisfied, last breath. Her journey was complete. Her rest was won. I glanced down at my watch and it was . . . seven o’clock! I just sat there stunned, unable to get up, somehow grateful to be alone.
My thoughts drifted to those who’d been wrestling with the reality of the storm, and my heart laid claim to a prayer that out of all their pain and suffering there would be an offsetting blessing too. I later learned that 7 A.M. was the official time of sunrise on Aug. 28, 1992, and the moment when Hurricane Andrew abated.
Marcia Swearingen
A Teenager’s Song for Gramma
This world is not conclusion, a sequel stands beyond—Invisible, as music, but positive, as sound.
Emily Dickinson
As I sort through stacks of sheet music next to the piano, I come across an almost-bare sheet of music—only a few measures of notes scrawled in my own sloppy script.
I stare at the unfinished waltz and my mind travels through the memories of my great-gramma Fritz.
I find myself standing in the huge garden next to Gramma’s white farmhouse in rural Iowa. Gramma loved plants and flowers. She cared for them all and prayed for them individually. I see her kneeling next to a soft mound of soil where a seed has just been planted. Gramma makes the sign of the cross over it and says, “God bless you, grow.”
Gramma Fritz was a creator. Nothing went to waste at her house. She used every scrap of fabric to make her famous quilts and “rag rugs.” She made mats out of bread sacks and doll clothes out of flour sacks. Every scrap of food was eaten, every bone boiled for broth.
Everything Gramma used was an original—like her— the meat grinder her mother used and the foot-powered sewing machine. When I told her about microwave ovens she quipped, “That’s all I need—some machine to help me get fat faster!”
That was Gramma. Witty, clever and a little
sarcastic. I’d been told that “Little Anna Fritz” never outgrew her schoolgirl spunk. She could outwit anyone—like a “stubborn German”—and everyone loved her for it. She always had a quip or quote. She blamed modern commercial Christmases on “Those wise men who just had to bring gold into the situation.”
After ninety years of strength and health, Gramma got sick. Sometimes she was winning her battle with congestive heart failure, other times she was not. When I realized that Gramma, like her beloved springtime, would not last forever, I wanted to do something really special for her, in honor of her. I wanted to write a song—more than a song, a beautiful piano piece. I wanted to capture my love for her and her spirit in music. It sounded easy, but it was not. Too soon I learned that composing the kind of music I wanted took a lot more than strong will and eight years of music lessons. I kept my goal a secret, though I don’t know why. Day after day, I tried and tried, refusing to give up, while becoming increasingly frustrated.
One night we got the long distance call from Iowa. Gramma’s condition was getting worse. I had to accept the reality, then, that writing her song would take a long, long time—perhaps longer than Gramma could wait. Still, I could not let go of my goal.
Finally I shared it and my frustration with my mom. She sat beside me on the piano bench and wrapped her arms around me, speaking with comfort and wisdom—with words I would have expected to hear from my wise gramma Fritz.
“Maybe it isn’t the music you’re afraid to let go. Maybe it’s Great-Gramma.”
She was right. I didn’t want to let go of Gramma. As long as I was hanging on to my goal, I felt like I was hanging on to her.
That night in bed I thought about what Mom had said and realized I would never have to give up Gramma or the wonderful gifts she had given me. Hers was a spirit that would live forever. She was a special blessing, and blessings never really die. The fear of losing her vanished. I fell asleep remembering Gramma telling me how she danced when she was young. She and her friends never tired, they just kept dancing.
Now I sit next to the piano with my unfinished goal in my hand. Dance, Little Anna, dance. You have helped me to be free.
Angela Thieman-Dino
Age fifteen
Love and Water
Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Mama died just days before my eleventh birthday, and my destiny careened dramatically from snug to looseended. Overnight, my childhood vanished. In those coming months Dad met Dot at work and began seeing her regularly. A year later, they married.
So much. So quickly. Another woman moving into our house stirred anew my still-fresh memories of Mama. At the same time, uninitiated Dot inherited a brood of three children, ages five, eight and eleven.
When alone, I listened to an old recording of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and I was convinced my mama sang those words to me from the other side. Yet, in moments of grief, I wondered, How can she walk with me now? My child’s heart yearned for a mother’s touch.
“Do you want the kids to call you ‘Mama’?” Dad asked Dot one day. Something in me wanted her to say, “Yes.”
Dot looked troubled for long moments, then said, “No. That wouldn’t be right.”
The no felt like a physical blow. Blood’s thicker’n water, came my grandma’s favorite litany. I’d not, until that very moment, grasped its meaning. My stepmother’s answer seemed proof that blood was thicker, that I was merely Daddy’s baggage—proof that, to her, despite the fact that she introduced me as “my daughter,” I was biologically not.
I was of the water. So I distanced myself.
My sulky aloofness hid a deep, deep need for acceptance. Yet, no matter how churlish I became, Dot never hurt me with harsh words. Ours was, in those trying days, a quiet, bewildered quest for harmony.
After all, we were stuck with each other. She had no more choice than I.
I visited Mama’s grave every chance I got, to talk things over with her. I never carried flowers because fresh arrangements always nestled lovingly against the headstone, put there, no doubt, by Daddy.
Then, in my fourteenth year, I came in from school one day and saw my newborn baby brother, Michael. I hovered over the bassinet, gently stroking the velvety skin as tiny fingers grasped mine and drew them to the little mouth. I dissolved into pure, maternal mush. Dot, still in her hospital housecoat, stood beside me.
In that moment, our gazes locked in wonder. “Can I hold him?”
She lifted him and placed him in my arms.
In a heartbeat, that tiny bundle snapped us together.
“Like your new coat?” Dot asked that Christmas as I pulled the beautiful pimento-red topper from the gift package and tried it over my new wool sweater and skirt.
In short months, Dot had become my best friend.
At Grandma’s house one Sunday, I overheard her tell my aunt Annie Mary, “I told James I didn’t think it was right to force the kids to call me Mama. Irene will always be Mama to them. That’s only right.”
So that’s why she’d said no.
Or was it? Blood’s thicker’n water. Was Grandma right? Was that always true in matters pertaining to familial loyalty? I shrugged uneasily, telling myself that it didn’t matter anyway.
Over the years, Dot embraced my husband, Lee, as “son,” soothed me through three childbirths, and afterward spent weeks with me, caring and seeing to my family’s needs. While grandmothering my children, she birthed three of her own, giving me two brothers and a sister. How special our children felt, growing up together, sharing unforgettable holidays like siblings.
In 1974, Lee and I lived two hundred miles away when a tragic accident claimed our eleven-year-old Angie. By nightfall, Dot was there, holding me. She was utterly heartbroken.
I moved bleakly through the funeral’s aftermath, secretly wanting to die. Every Friday evening, I dully watched Dot’s little VW pull into my driveway. “Daddy can’t come. He has to work,” she’d say. After leaving work, she drove four hours nonstop to be with me each weekend, a long trek that continued for three months.
During those visits, she walked with me to the cemetery, held my hand and wept with me. If I didn’t feel like talking, she was quiet. If I talked, she listened. She was so there that, when I despaired, she single-handedly shouldered my anguish.
Soon, I waited at the door on Fridays. Slowly, life seeped into me again.
Nearly twenty years later, Dad’s sudden auto accident death yanked the earth from beneath me and again I lapsed into shock, inconsolable. My first reaction was, I need to be with Dot, my family.
Then, for the first time since adolescence, a cold, irrational fear blasted me with the force of TNT. Dad, my genetic link, gone. I’d grown so secure with the Daddy-and-Dot alliance through the years that I’d simply taken family solidarity for granted. Now with Dad’s abrupt departure, the chasm he left loomed murky and frightening.
Had Dad, I wondered, been the glue? Was glue genetic, after all?
Terrifying thoughts spiraled through my mind as Lee drove me to join relatives.
Will I lose my family? The peril of that jolted me to the core.
“Blood’s thicker’n water.”
If Grandma felt that way, couldn’t Dot feel that way, too, just a little bit? The small child inside my adult body wailed and howled forlornly. It was in this frame of mind that I entered Dot’s house after the accident.
Dot’s house. Not Dad’s and Dot’s house anymore.
Would Daddy’s void change her? She loved me, yes, but suddenly I felt keenly DNA-stripped, the stepchild of folklore. A sea of familiar faces filled the den. Yet, standing in the midst of them all, I felt utterly alone.
“Susie!” Dot’s voice rang out, and through a blur I watched her sail like a porpoise to me. “I’m so sorry about Daddy, honey,” she murmured and gathered me into her arms.
Terror scattered lik
e startled ravens.
What she said next took my breath. She looked me in the eye and said gently, “He’s with your mama now.”
I snuffled and gazed into her kind face. “He always put flowers on Mama’s grave. . . .”
She looked puzzled, then smiled sadly. “No, honey, he didn’t put the flowers on her grave.”
“Then who . . . ?”
She looked uncomfortable. Then she leveled her gaze with mine. “I did.”
“You?” I asked, astonished. “All those years?” She nodded, then wrapped me in her arms again.
Truth smacked me broadside. Blood is part water. Grandma just didn’t get it.
With love blending them, you can’t tell one from the other.
I asked Dot recently, “Isn’t it time I started calling you Mom?”
She smiled and blushed. Then I thought I saw tears spring in her eyes.
“Know what I think?” I said, putting my arms around her. “I think Mama’s looking down at us from heaven, rejoicing that you’ve taken such good care of us, grandmothering my children, doing all the things she’d have done if she’d been here. I think she’s saying, ‘Go ahead, Susie, call her Mom.” I hesitated, suddenly uncertain. “Is that okay?”
In a choked voice, she replied, “I would consider it an honor.”
Mama’s song to me was true: I do not walk alone.
Mom walks with me.
Emily Sue Harvey
The Perspective of a Pansy
What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages.
Henry Ward Beecher