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| This picture is posed, not candid. She was not really a cuddly grandma, though I think she would have liked to be, wanted the world to see her this way, even if it wasn't her nature. I remember sitting for these pictures when my mom was starting her child care business (Janet's House). Mom (or likely dad) wanted a picture to put on the flyers. My grandparents supported my mom in so many small and big ways. They moved to Bayfield around the same time my mom opened her daycare and helped with it's operation as well as being there to help with my brothers and I. Any time any of us travelled, they gave us a card with extra money so we could experience where we were beyond just getting ourselves there. |
I wrote the following in 2017 in an email to a few of my closest friends. I thought maybe I would edit it into a blogpost at some point, but I never had it in me, or got to it, but I returned to it today and realized it doesn't need any editing. It is my (im)perfect eulogy to the (im)perfect woman who was my Grandma Heist:
My grandma died early Friday and I've been struggling to find the words for the mixed emotions, for this wonderful and wonderfully complex woman--an agitated grandmother for peace, lover of my ordained grandpa, but bitter towards the church, motherless at four, and orphaned at seven, left to raise her younger sister, her cousins, her children and grandchildren, devoted teacher to many more in Iowa, Papua New Guinea, and at Janet's House.
Friday night Oscar and I came home from the farm and spent our evening outdoors, building a fire, cooking and eating venison brats, weeding and eating from the garden.
"You be the baby kitty and I'll be the mama kitty," he says as the sun sets behind the trees.
And a little little later when I let out a sob, for the grandma I've lost, for the parents she lost when she was still so young, he turns to me in pink glow and asks with such care, "What's the matter baby kitty?"
Her last years have been hard, the past year especially, for her, for my mom.... Dementia takes away the person you know and leaves a shell, a whisper (or angry shouts) of who they once were. I’ve wished so much there was another way.
You be the baby kitty and I’ll be the mama kitty.
[this part needs more… how the roles shift, from mama to baby and back? does a troubled past, or a troubled present, make it harder or easier to love? Maybe like Sherman Alexie, not having the typical motherly love as much (as his recent memoir is about) allows more love for strangers?]
She was not the kind of grandma to smother me in kisses, or snuggle my baby son. But she was the kind of grandma that would wear a rainbow button on her jacket and tell everyone how much she loved her lesbian granddaughter.
If the grandma I knew was present today, she would have been nodding her head at Tina Fey on Weekend Update last Saturday. She would not have been discouraged in these times, but fired up! (Overwhelming so.) Gripping arms in the library, the grocery store, the hardware store, slipping Alexie's Hymn into pockets, mailboxes, electric bills, and then sending me to the library to make a hundred copies more.
