Grandma

My Grandma Lois passed away yesterday morning. We re-arranged our travel arrangements and are making a last minute trip to the embassy in Dublin to get Emmet's passport tomorrow and will fly out Friday morning to get to the visitation and funeral.
She had not been doing really well for a while. She was still able to live at home, but needed assistance everyday. She had become a dependent old woman, something I think she never wanted to be, and that made her demanding, self centered, and difficult to be around. That and the near constant pain she felt. The pain medication made her incoherent and sleepy very often. Remembering her like that, makes it difficult to feel much more than relief that her suffering is over, and relief from your own worry.
But when you think about the feisty grandma, the only way I knew her, she was the tears come quickly.
She was an extremely clean, tidy person, in contrast to my mother, so her visits were always met with a flurry of vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing. She was good natured about it, and we once teased her about opening up a G-ma hot line, with potential easy to remember numbers like 1-800- VACUUM, or 1-800-DUST NOW.
We, my sisters and I, were going to create a signature scent for her called G! The tag line for the ad campaign would be, "It's not your typical old lady smell." I have forgotten now what it was going to smell like. But it would have been perfect for her.
This is the grandma who "baked" batches of scotcharoos and brought them to me everyday when I was in the hospital for my appendectomy. The grandma that took us back to school shopping at Ayres and to lunch at Arnies, and maybe for a treat we'd stop at Frozen Custard.
She told us stories from when she was little about the chickens pecking her when she tried to collect the eggs so she put on her dad big boots and gloves and tried to trick the chickens. And the first time she tried to quilt, she made her sister sit under the quilting frame and they poked the needle back and forth between them.
When we lived off campus in college, she had my sister and me over once a week for dinner. And insisted we drop our laundry off for her to do. In exchange we raked her leaves, took thing up to and down from the attic, and fertilized roses. And had to help her with her church bazaar. Rachel and I always referred to it as a "bizarre" to which grandma would say something grandmotherly like, "Cut it out, you yahoos" or "I'm going to pound you into the ground." The only other phase that comes to mind right now of hers is "Nay, nay, nay, Pauline."
Grandma taught me how to sew for 4H, and took me shopping for fashion review. She could always be counted on for corduroy pants, sorry, slacks, for Christmas, and something delicious in the "slidey pan." She even had set out a small box of toys at her house for when her great-grandsons came to visit. She got such joy from Silas and Ellis. I'm so sorry she will never meet Emmet.
She was generous and spirited, kind and good humored.
I love you Grandma and I miss you already.