Ninety and Still Going

My grandmother (my mom’s mom) has had a long and full life of ups and downs. She was born to a farm family, and from the stories she was told, she was lucky she was a happy, easy-going baby. She spent her earliest days left on a bed, her mother too busy watching the other children and doing the chores that needed done on a farm to spend a lot of time with the tiny baby who stayed so quiet.

She grew up in the Great Depression, and remembers going to the only store in her tiny village, trading what little their farm produced in exchange for flour, sugar, and other necessities for a family to survive. They reused everything and made do with what little they had. She also met my grandfather in that small farming community.

During World War II, she joined the WAVES, the female support staff of the US Navy, while my grandfather served as a fighter pilot in the Canadian Royal Air Force, and then in the US Air Force once the US joined the war.

After the war, they married and returned to their small rural Ohio community where they raised livestock as well as three daughters. Even in the 1950’s, she still had no indoor plumbing, getting her water from a well outside the house. Cooking a chicken for dinner involved grabbing a chicken from the yard, cutting its head off, and then plucking it and preparing it for dinner.

Eventually they moved to a house in the nearby village – with indoor plumbing – and my grandmother became a secretary while my grandfather went into law enforcement and eventually become the sheriff of the county. They pushed their daughters to further their education, to become women who would make a difference in the world, with one earning an MBA and another her PhD. The third earned only an Associates degree, but she gave them a different and just as precious gift: a granddaughter.

Then, in 1976, just months before I was to be born, my grandmother lost her husband to a heart attack. She’s been alone ever since.

And yet she hasn’t been alone. For a short while my mother and I lived with her. And even after my mom was able to afford her own place, we were only two towns away from that tiny village and visited often. Her other daughters have remained close, too. In the past six years, she’s seen her two great-granddaughters born, and where she remained more distant in my upbringing, she’s increasingly warm towards my girls and enjoys watching their silliness.

She has traveled the world with her daughters and her friends, enjoyed her hobbies, and maintained a level of independence that baffles even me. Her life experience has given her a hard exterior – she’s a happy person, but she sees no point in being overly emotional. Depression and exuberance are equally useless to her. She believes in a strong work ethic and the simple morals of being honest and good to people.

This spring, my grandmother had a stroke, and suddenly the family was hit with the realization that this woman of steel was mortal. Amazingly, she bounced back from the stroke, fighting her way through rehab in order to get back to her own house again. She gave up the two-story house in that tiny village a few years ago, now living in the single-story house I grew up in so that my mother is closer to her. This is a good thing, as the stroke has left her weaker, more tired. But she still insists on living by herself, independently.

Today, my grandmother turned ninety years old. 9-0. At ninety years old, she still lives alone, drives her own car, and makes her own meals. She’s been a widow for 34 years now – longer than the time she was married to my grandfather. And while she sometimes repeats the same story over and over, forgetting that she’s told us before and we already understand the message in it, her mind is mostly clear and sharp despite ninety years worth of experiences crowding the space.

I don’t know how much longer she’ll be with us. My grandmother is slowing down, looking more frail every day. And while we haven’t always seen eye-to-eye (my teenage years were rough on both of us), I do respect the tremendous amount of knowledge and experience she has. I only hope I can take advantage of the time we have left to preserve more of her stories, her history, so my daughters can someday know more about the woman they call G-G.

Happy birthday, grandma. You made it to ninety, just like you said you would at your eightieth birthday party.