I’m the luckiest person in the world and, if you don’t believe me, I can show you a long list of reasons to support my contention. High up on the list is my childhood blessed by four incredible grandparents who were all unique and cool in their own way.
Grandma Sally, my father’s mother, was the no-nonsense grandparent in the bunch. Rarely inclined to burst out laughing and a little short in the Generosity Department when it came to dispensing cookies and hugs, Grandma Sally was a tough and resilient woman who offered me insights into life during the Great Depression and World War II that 100 history books couldn’t provide.
I’ve thought about her a lot this week with the constant news barrage about seniors struggling with anxiety, even fear, as they attempt to schedule COVID-19 vaccination appointments. It is a cruel irony that a pandemic responsible for killing scores of older Americans also managed to evade efforts to get survivors inoculated against the virus.
Both my grandmothers were plagued by pain and misery caused by poor health during a time in America when today’s medical advances couldn’t even be imagined by doctors. Asthma played a leading role in my mother’s mother’s death and arthritis turned Grandma Sally’s hands into twisted claws and bent her back so that she walked with a stoop.
But poor health and a life without 21st century medicine could not hobble her spirit. My grandfather brought humor and a belief in living life simply but well into their marriage. But Grandma Sally was the relationship’s undisputed brains and driving force.
My father always took pride during family gatherings in talking his mother into telling the story of how she hit the road with my grandfather and they crossed the western United States during the Depression and early years of the war picking up painting jobs. Grandma Sally lined up the work and Grandpa Bud dipped the brush into the paint.
I can imagine her standing next to a store on a dirt road somewhere in Nebraska in one of her cloth coats or faux furs, drumming up business on a rotary dial wall-mounted phone while my grandfather leaned under the open hood of their car, working to coax another 100 miles out of the engine.
I broke my right hip when I was 14 in a climbing accident and spent the summer reading, listening to FM radio, and feeling sorry for myself until Grandma Sally leveled me one day with one of her classic lectures: “You’re stumping around on crutches and moping. You hit a bump on Life’s road. So what? The secret’s to keep on moving.”
I never asked my grandmother about her childhood, about how she met my grandfather, and about the people close to her who died in World War II. I thought the arthritis pain and the long Wyoming winters she endured shaped her into the woman I remember. I was wrong.
Her character and tenacity were qualities that defined her in the face of the miseries she endured. They allowed her to overcome pain and hard memories and made her the woman who loved me enough to know when she needed to be hard on me while other people were letting me take the soft and easier way.
I like to think that the seniors who lost spouses, siblings and dear friends to COVID-19, and who are waiting for vaccinations, are made from the same tough stuff that I was lucky enough to have my grandmother share with me.
