My grandmother’s old. Like really old. She’s starting her 93rd year on earth today and I wish I could step in her steps for the rest of my path. Eventually the footprints will stop. I’ll reach out and have nothing, but memories to hold onto.
Her real name is Agnes, but everyone knows her as Nancy. She has outlived her husband and her generation in our family. She’s watched all of her friends move on. Death is in the wail of the Banshee. My grandmother’s losing her hearing and may never hear her call to heaven. She fights a lot of battles with her body and with spirit, yet each morning her eyes open to the Florida sun.
To think of the hours you spend on the Fourth of July goofing around with your siblings and cousins. Your friends call on you and want to race here and there before everything settles in the flickering light of the fireworks. Imagine this all tucked away and locked up in heaven for youthful eyes only. You can see videos and photographs of your grandparents when they were young. Maybe they even look like you a little.
When you put so much momentum behind trying to get older it’s hard to slow it down once you’ve tipped your way past youth. The advertisements can speak all they want about staying young, but my grandmother walked all over Scotland, then she had a cane helping her around New Jersey, and someday she’ll be mostly immobile. There was a time when you lay in bed and saw the future in a slideshow playing on your ceiling. Then an age comes where the only thing you see lying in bed are pictures of people you knew and loved hanging on the wall. There’s a spot for your picture there too.
We haven’t given up on my grandmother. We cherish every moment, every story, even every complaint. If she keeps fighting, we’ll fight for her. Our family keeps growing under her. While you spend so much time working for retirement and hoping you have enough to keep you going for the rest of your time, love is free. It’s the strongest root you can find in nature. Her root is down and it’s going to be hard when the reaper comes to clean up. Our tears will not let her grow back to this earth, but it will keep the roots strong when our parents become aged.
I can’t imagine my mom being elderly, but it will happen. I can’t see myself and my wife so much older, but it will happen. I look at the aged now and I wonder what path brought them to their physical point. My grandmother didn’t do yoga or eat nuts or drink wine. She’s kind of feeble, but she’s still here. Maybe cleaner living will work. I think she’s satisfied to eat a hot dog and drink root beer like she did in Jersey City running errands with her mom ages ago.
When you think about ninety-two years invested into this world, it’s like a panoramic picture that you see in whole. If you look closer, at each point there’s detail. Immigrant parents only a couple years on these shores living in hardscrabble Jersey City. First there’s you and then a brother. In youth you’re already making the voyage back to the homeland of Scotland, a trip that became second nature. Your father dies just as the Depression clicks in. You watch your mother struggle, but eventually catches her wind. You find love yourself chopped in two by the axe of war. He survives where so many others perished and you wed even if the money was short. You’ve got a job and suddenly a baby in Hoboken. Then your first house sprouts up in the suburbs, finally out from the shadow of New York City. The family grows. Life is finally stable. Stable enough for retirement then he gets cancer and your brother dies. Your parents are gone. The extended family is starting to fall into the sea. Your husband is gone and you still have energy. Soon you have grandkids. How could you be a grandmother already? Nature asks you to slow down a little bit. As it ticks away, it becomes thirty years of watching, wondering how the world changed so much from what your parents told you about. There were still people to visit and talk about the old times. Now there are great-grandchildren, but the visits are limited to her house.
That’s the definition of old.
I suppose I’ll be old one day. I don’t know how my mind will take the challenge of watching the world I cultivated slowly fade away person by person. I’ll look at grandma Nancy’s footprints and wonder why they still dwarf my feet. Maybe I’ll have the confidence to create my own path, but I’ve one ready-made for me if I need it.
Happy 92nd birthday to Nancy Roderick. We’re all just following along with the story as it unfolds.
Darkness Before the Light 