In Memory of Nana

I imagine that everyone is tired of reading sad posts on my blog. I think about writing stories on Christmas lights or scented soaps or books set in France, but life has other plans.
On Wednesday afternoon, I learned that my 97-year-old grandmother died.

This was in August at my cousin's
daughter's wedding. 

Now, I realize that most people as old as I am are fortunate to have parents living and in good health, much less a grandmother. But my grandmother, Nana, has resisted old age.
One of my nieces pointed out that Nana is the only woman she knows who gave up high  heels at age 92. That makes her practically French, doesn't it?
Nana led a typical Kentucky life, marrying at age 16 to a man 12 years older because he wanted a young bride that he could raise the way he wanted. That sounds terribly sexist, which it was, but he might have gotten more than  he planned on when he married my strong-willed grandmother. The two of them had three children, one of them my father.
Nana helped run a general store and the family lived above the store, until one night a fire broke out. The family escaped and stood outside in the cold watching their home, livelihood and several hundred dollars in life savings burn to the ground, My grandfather didn't believe in banks, so he kept cash. He nearly died trying to save the money.
Some of Nana's jobs after that included running a hotel, which I vaguely remember as a child. What fun to visit my grandmother and get to stay in a hotel room! She also worked at the post office and knew everyone in her small town.
One of my favorite stories from Nana was when she rode a horse into town to get a permanent at the beauty shop. Just the idea that they didn't have a car to drive, they still relied on horses or wagons, but she still searched out the permanent wave for her thin hair. But the story got better. On the way home, the horse got stuck in quicksand. Nana had to crawl off the horse's neck to get to solid ground then tug on the horse's reins until she got him up to dry ground too. Another time she told about the horse running away with her as she lay flat and wrapped her hands around its neck, holding on for her life.
Kentucky, especially the poor parts, has always been behind the rest of the world, but the idea of using outhouses and riding horses to town even 80 years ago strikes me as "Little House on the Prairie."
My grandfather died 32 years ago, but Nana wasn't finished with marriage. She dated a few guys before she lucked into meeting Ish. They fell in love like a lightning strike and married quickly to spend their remaining years together.
Ish freed Nana in a way. She went from a woman who only wore dresses, to someone who discovered pants were sensible and sometimes more modest than dresses. She began to spend winters in Arizona, and she and Ish traveled to explore new lands, including Venezuela.

Here's my Aunt June, Nana, me and Grace

They returned to live in Kentucky and Ish died in the late 1990s. Nana continued to live alone. We convinced her to buy a smaller house for awhile, but after a year, she sold it for a profit and moved back to her big house with five bedrooms, two kitchens, two living rooms, a dining room and acres of land.
A few years ago, she had a stroke. She insisted on lying down for awhile rather than calling the
emergency squad. She never fully regained strength in her left side, but she lived at home with her daughter or a live-in helper, intent on completing many tasks at home. She would slide down the stairs on her butt to get to the lower level and go through her belongings, deciding what to keep or discard.
A few years ago, she became terribly ill. I drove the four hours from Columbus to be with her. My aunt and uncle in Kentucky both had the flu and couldn't visit her in the hospital. My parents in Florida weren't within reach. I sat by her hospital bed, but she didn't wake up. I didn't think she'd make it through the night.
I called my parents and told them to come. They did, and Nana was better by the time they arrived. She seemed to beat all the odds.

This was probably celebrating her 90th birthday, or maybe 92. 

Nana mostly lived at home, but would go into the nursing home for three months at a time to give my aunt a break from caretaking duty.
In October, another call from the hospital. She had pneumonia. I drove down to sit by her bed. My aunt had been there all night and I waved her off to shower and rest. I pulled up a chair by Nana's bed, and for someone who they thought could die, she sat in bed alert. She hardly dozed at all. Instead, we talked.
She asked me about her great grandchildren, and her great-great grandchildren. I showed her pictures on my cell phone. We talked about her early life.
"When I woke up, I thought Wilbert was sitting in that chair," she said. Wilbert was my grandfather, her first husband.
We talked for a few minutes and she told me, "I was unhappy married," and I knew she meant in her first marriage. "But he was a good father."
She wasn't inclined to talk about her future, in this world or in heaven, in spite of her strong religious beliefs.
She fell asleep about half an hour before I needed to leave for the 4-hour drive back home.
"I love you, Nana," I whispered as I kissed her soft hair, plastered down in the back against the bed.
And she recovered again, returning to the nursing home to play bingo.
Then Wednesday, Mom texted me that Nana  had died.
I have to guess that she has no regrets, even though she didn't quite make it to her 98th birthday.

Remembrances

My Aunt Marie, dressed in blue, her hair a faded honey color that reached nearly to her shoulders, stood watching her 12 adult grandchildren get their photograph taken.
"Do you want to get in there and have your picture taken with them?" I asked her.
"I guess," she said and took a few steps toward them. Then she stopped.
"No," she blinked away tears. "It's too sad without Dad."
We were at the dinner following her husband's funeral.
My Uncle Clarence died New Year's morning in his sleep. He hadn't been sick. His oldest son thinks he knew he was getting ready to go: "He always said he wanted to go on the back of a tractor and he ran that thing pretty hard the last forty-eight hours."
One of my other aunts asked Marie how old she was when they married 66 years before.
"I was one month shy of my 17th birthday," she said.
In Kentucky, where they lived, she had to be 17 or get her parents' permission to marry.
"My parents wouldn't sign," she said. "They liked Clarence just fine but thought I was too young to know what I was doing."
So her cousin forged the signature, and Clarence married Marie, and they were together for 66 years until Tuesday morning when she found him still in bed at 8 a.m. He had watched the celebration of the New Year before dying in his sleep.
During the funeral, I was sitting behind my Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim has one daughter and one granddaughter. So when the preacher read the list of survivors for Uncle Clarence -- four children, 16 grandchildren, 29 great-grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren -- Uncle Jim exclaimed, "Lawd Al-mighty!"
Uncle Clarence was in the Navy during World War II, so soldiers stood by the gravesite and gave a 21-gun salute. A sailor was there to play "Taps."
When I wrote my novel The Summer of France, I based one of the characters on my uncles' war stories. The character Uncle Martin was a Kentucky boy who jumped in to join the war effort. I even dedicated the book to my uncles.


My Mother in the center. Uncle Albert is on the far right with Uncle Junior next to him.

But I never gave Uncle Clarence a copy before he died. I took copies yesterday for Uncle Junior, 91, and Uncle Albert, 80,  who are still healthy. I wanted to make sure they knew they had inspired me. And I gave a copy to one of Clarence's daughters. So many of us have older relatives that we take for granted. Don't wait until it's too late to gather their stories.
You never know when  you may need a story to draw on, and all of that wisdom is just waiting to be shared.