How I remember you

My great grandmother died this morning at 5:30AM. She had been living in a Florida nursing home for the past few years and was just about to go into hospice care, but never got there. She was 96 years old.

Of all the great-grandchildren, I probably knew the most of her. I was very young when my great grandfather died of a heart attack. I thought he drowned in the basement. I was pretty young and didn’t know better (there had been a basement flooding at the time of his death). But that is what I remember.

But my mother wasn’t close to her, and because of this we really didn’t have much of a relationship. There would be the occasional card at birthdays when I was young, sometimes accompanied by a dollar bill or a tacky t-shirt with a pelican on it. When she’d come for visits, I wasn’t who she was coming to see. She had grandchildren to see. I was the adopted child of the granddaughter who she didn’t care for. Her daughter had gotten pregnant young, and she disapproved. In many ways, I think my mother embodied to my great grandmother all of her disappointment.

Sad, but it happens sometimes.

I can’t recall the last time I saw her, but it was probably at least ten years ago, maybe at a family reunion. I’m sure she had no idea who I was and probably wondered if the family had hired Oriental help.

The last meaningful conversation I had with her was when I was in high school. She was on one of her summer visits up to Michigan with her daughter, my great aunt. It was the summer before my senior year. I’d been biking all summer and had just hit a point in my adolescence where I had lost a few pounds. I looked pretty good and felt good about myself.

I was at my grandmother’s house that day she pulled up and got out of the car. She looked at me and said, “you don’t look as chunky as you did the last time I saw you.”

It didn’t matter what she said from that point on, because I will always remember those words and how they sliced right into me.

So she’s gone. And while I won’t say I don’t feel anything, I don’t feel much. And I don’t feel terrible about it. I can comfort the members of my family who are having a hard time with her death, who were close to her. And it’s not that I can’t forgive her for an underhanded compliment she tried to pay me when I was a kid almost twenty years ago. But when I think of her and what her life represented to me, what I remember are those few words she spoke to me that summer afternoon.

I hope that when I die, that is not the kind of legacy I leave. To anyone.