Tue, 30 Nov 2004
So I'm in Indiana, unexpectedly. We found out Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving, that my grandmother (my dad's mother) had passed away during the night. Her memory had been been fading over the past couple years, and last year at this time she moved out of the house that my grandfather built and into a nursing home. The last time I saw her -- last December -- I'm not sure she remembered who I was. She died after spending Thanksgiving with her family and talking to all of her seven children on the phone; it seems almost like she decided it was time to go.
All of her children are here now, along with about half of her sixteen grandchildren. Everyone is taking turns looking through old pictures, and my dad and his brothers are practicing one of the old barbershop quartet numbers they used to sing as teenagers. Along with the photos was a collection of old Christmas letters that my grandparents had sent out over the years, and I scanned through them for a quick survey of my dad's life up until the year I was born.
Depending on how you define a generation, there's at least 3 here. Probably more; I'm 25, and my cousin Jaden is 3. And as I look through pictures of my grandparents' wedding, my parents' wedding, and 80 years of visual history, I'm thinking about how the world has changed and how the way we interact with it has as well. Last night I was with my best friend of 13 years. She's back in Iowa after being sent home from the Peace Corps for medical reasons. We've had an ongoing dialogue for the past 5 years (at least) about what we're doing with our lives; neither of us is quite sure yet. There are countless options and possibilities open to us; in spite of this, or because of it, we can't seem to decide on one path to carry us through the next few decades. We constantly find ourselves at a crossroads, contemplating the many directions we could turn. And we're not alone in this; I have the same conversations with almost everyone I know.
I'm sure my parents' and grandparents' generations must have faced similar issues -- I won't fall into the trap of saying everything was easier then. But in reading through the old Christmas letters I get the sense of things just falling into place. And maybe in retrospect all of our lives do. My grandmother lived to be 84, and the narrative of her life is fairly typical. She grew up, married, raised children, saw those children get married and have children, and grew old in the house she had lived in for 50 years. I don't know what she was thinking about when she was my age, or even my parents' age. Even if I'd had the chance to ask, would she have remembered? I know my high school agonies have faded over the past 8 years, and I imagine when I'm 80 I will have forgotten about the dilemnas that seem to occupy so much of my time these days.
Funerals are either a time to fondly reminisce, or to dig up old dirt. In the case of my dad's family, I think it will be entirely the former. Rather than spending the next few days continuing my ongoing discussion with Bess, I'll spend it with my extended family remembering my grandmother.
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