Learning As Remembering Your Favourite Person

CW: Death

This blog is going to be a bit different this week. On Sunday my grandmother passed away from COVID. She was 100. Before she got COVID around New Years, she was still a wonderful conversationalist, a funny and incredibly caring person. I looked forward to our FaceTime conversations (which was the main way of communicating due to the pandemic), and I was very lucky to see her in person at the end of October. Our last in-person conversation was very much the same kind of conversation we have had for years now, her saying these things "why are you working so much?" "I don't know how you live in the city, I don't like it," "I like it when you laugh and smile," "I know you care about me and respect me"  and me just listening and nodding and agreeing with everything because well she was not wrong. She was rarely ever wrong.

I think the only thing my grandmother used to do on a regular basis that I would qualify as "wrong" was when she used to literally place her hand on all four elements of the stove before leaving the house to make sure they were not still on. I used to tell her, gramma that is a really unsafe way to check that you have shut the stove, but she insisted on doing this. The other "wrong" thing she used to do is use the biggest knife in the kitchen to open packages of lunchmeat. Of course there was that one accident involving a bit of her finger and maybe that was a learning experience for her, yet my mother will still open packages with things she should not open packages with, so that's a perfect example of learning through example I guess. 

These small anecdotes are probably the only 2 things I have where I could say, jeez, gramma I wish you wouldn't have done that. The rest of my memories of her are all kinds of learning that I have and continue to take with me every day. My maternal grandparents are the single most source of my ethics and my love of learning. They taught me so much and I am grateful every day for the time, wisdom, and care they shared with me.

I didn't do the eulogy at the funeral because I needed more time to get all of my memories out. So I am doing it now I guess, here, as a tribute to the things I have learned from her, the things I will remember. One of my earliest memories is sitting on her very yellow/gold couch watching her read a Reader's Digest. Gosh she loved that Reader's Digest. Watching her read made me realize that this was an important thing, and I too became an avid reader. She loved word puzzles and we used to do word searches together all the time when I was younger. Because of this I became really good at word searches when we had to do them in school. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house. I know in my heart that all that exposure to words and reading is why I really connected to education and learning. There was always something to learn there, and it is often in retrospect that I realize how much there was to learn there. 

There was also a lot of experiential learning in that house. Gramma was always so worried about thunderstorms (I on the other hand love them in a Wuthering Heights sort of way). When there was a thunderstorm coming, she would ask me to get on my hands and knees and unplug her television because she worried that the thunder would ruin it (and you know TV's are not cheap and we wanted to preserve it). The thing is she had this plush carpeting and that house was always so so dry that everything, including gramma herself with her love of sweaters, would give you an electric shock. So I would crawl to unplug the TV and inevitably get the shock of my life from the socket. But of course the TV was safe, which meant more The Young and The Restless, and The Edge of Night, and The Littlest Hobo because poppa loved that dog. 

On Sundays we used to go there for supper and have spaghetti and Kentucky Fried Chicken. In the bucket the youngest grandkid would get what was called "the little leg" which was basically the drumstick from the wing, and that little leg got passed down every Sunday from the four grandkids over time. Gramma was such a good cook. There are things that I try so hard to make taste like hers, but I can't because I didn't spend enough time watching her do it. I have the recipes but it's the execution part that I need more of. Things like beef stew and potato salad with apples. On Mondays Poppa would come get us at the school in his truck that smelled like diesel, and drive us to their house for leftover spaghetti lunch. Gramma would often supplement this with "cheese in the oven" which was basically a Kraft cheese single (or later on when poppa had heart problems, hi-lo cheese) on a piece of white bread toasted in the oven. Sometimes she would forget it was there and it would burn a bit on top and poppa or gramma would have to use the dishrag to stop the smoke detector. When we walked back to school she would sometimes give us 0.45$ to buy a bag of chips at the depanneur as a treat. 

In the summertime she would sit on her porch and I would sit there with her. And sometimes she would say "do you want to go for a walk?" and I of course would say yes. The thing is gramma didn't like straying far, so our walks were literally to the corner and back. Like one house over and back. To gramma that was a big walk, and that also made me realize the importance of context at an early age. Poppa was okay to walk all over the countryside, gramma just wanted to go one house over. 

When I moved away for school she would call me and leave messages on my residence phone. Having someone who lived to a 100 is also great in terms of learning from the changes in technology. When I was little we didn't have voicemail. By the time I was in undergrad we did and watching my grandmother navigate that technology was also important for me to consider how not everyone knows how to use everything. She would leave me these 3 minute messages that sounded like she was reading a letter. She would tell me what was going on there with poppa, how the weather was, ask me how my classes were going, and then she would always end her message with, love gramma, just like she was signing a card or a letter. It used to make laugh so much, and I still think about those voicemails almost 30 years later.

The last time I saw her in person in October I took a picture with my phone and asked her to look at the camera. The picture I took was her pointing at the camera trying to figure out how a camera was in a phone. I love everything about that picture because it is really an image of her figuring out technology, but also her being her, questioning why this even exists in the first place. 

I spent so much time with gramma before I moved away for school. And even when I came back to visit I tried so much to spend as much time with her as I could. That was made a bit more difficult when she was moved to a long term care home, but I still loved visiting with her so much when I was in town. We would sit and have coffee. She would eat a bebe poutine.

It is going to be very weird to call my mother now and not ask "how's the grammin?" She was my favourite person for so long, but I know that I carry and will continue to carry so much that I have learned from her going forward. Like how to spot and then ultimately ignore people who are jealous of whatever thing you have accomplished and who then try to erase your accomplishments because those people are toxic. Like how sometimes if you put a little olive oil on cut celery stalks with some salt it is delicious (but not pepper because you don't want people thinking you didn't wash your celery). Like if you don't like chemical sprays in your house if you put a bit of orange rind on the stove element it can mask the fish smell from supper. So many things, things that I am not remembering now, but I know will come to me in context and I will be sure to thank her for that knowledge and her kindness. 

I will miss you gramma, you were the best human, thank you for caring about us, thank you for teaching us so many things. I am grateful that I had you in my life for so long.