Mi Abuela

I lost my grandmother 5 years ago today on August 17, 2007.  She had a stroke on August 15.  They took her to the hospital and put her on life support, but brain scans showed she had no brain function so they disconnected her from life support and she lived for two more days.  I was not there at the time she actually passed, but neither was she, really.  For all practical purposes she departed this life on August 15.  She was 92 at the time.  She would have been 93 if she had lived 7 more days.

I miss my grandmother and I think about her daily.  She was the stay at home mother of 5 daughters and the wife of a rural mail carrier.  She was a tiny little woman with the most beautiful white hair.  You might think a person like that would not have much in the way of wisdom to impart, but she lived through a lot - The Great Depression, WWII, delivering 5 children (some of them at home; all without pain relief.) She taught me some very important lessons in my life.  Below are a few.

• People will visit - you should make food.  If you were privileged enough to dine at Pauline Shanklin's table, you know what I'm talking about.  She was a fabulous cook.  She cooked I guess what you would call "country" food.  There was always homemade bread or rolls and homemade cinnamon rolls with this icing she made from leftover coffee and powdered sugar and I don't know what else, but it was divine and I have yet to eat a cinnamon roll as good as hers.  In fact, when she had the stroke that day, she was in the middle of taking a pan of homemade rolls she had made out of the oven and she just fell over dropping the rolls and all.  She had made them for my mother to eat on her daily visit to her apartment where she lived alone with no assistance.  Occasionally she would make homemade biscuits instead of rolls, but you should never call a roll a biscuit or vice versa because they are 2 totally different things and she would tell you just that if you asked for a biscuit when rolls were being served.  I lived my entire life thinking what a gracious hostess she was, and she was.  It was only recently while mumbling a lot of bad words out of frustration during creation of a large spread of food for a bunch of people that I realized there had to be times when she was tired or didn't want to cook and wanted to tell everyone to go eat some cereal, but she never expressed it.  To quote a line from a country song, she was like a "...Sunday morning full of grace and full of Jesus."  (Lee Brice, Hard to Love)
• Going to church does not make you a Christian, but you should go anyway.  When I see that little thing people put on Facebook all the time that says something like "going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in the garage makes you a car" I get a little irritated.  Of course going to church does not make you a Christian, but what does that have to do with standing in a garage?  I understand the premise of the little saying, but what I'm saying is that if you are a Christian anyway and that is why you are going to church, you are probably going to get better at it if you go to church than if you don't. If you're just pretending about the whole thing, you probably have other issues on which you should work.  I realize there are people who attend church with ulterior motives.  I guess that's a problem.  But are there people standing in garages thinking they will become cars?  That would be an even bigger problem.  Anyway, Grandma always expected us to be in church and she was always in church.  Having grown up that way, I get disappointed in myself when I miss church -which I've done a lot of lately.  Perhaps it's guilt, but it can't be all bad to feel that way.
• Women, girls, females, they will never stop gossiping and being petty, but you should stop.  I remember a story Grandma told my sister-in-law.  She must have been about 85 at the time (grandma - not sister-in-law) But my sister-in-law was complaining about some girls she worked with talking behind her back and being petty and mean.  Grandma told her that no matter how old you get it never stops and that very day some ladies in her Sunday School class were gossiping and talking about another lady who was not present at the time. This was surprising to me.  I guess I assumed there was a time we would all "age out" of the pettiness and ugliness system but there's not I guess.

There is so much more that I miss about her, but I'll save it for another time.  Of course I wish I could have seen her and talked to her just one more time before she died, but she knew I loved her and I know she loved me.

Thanks for reading.