My Kentucky Grandma

My mother’s parents both died in the spring of 1965. I graduated from High School in May that year. My grandmother died first, and less than three months later, my grandfather followed her.

My mother was inconsolable. I know this because I tried to console her, but being only eighteen years old and inexperienced, how could I help her with this heavy burden?

All I could do was listen, but true understanding of this event only occurred when she died. Some things in life cannot be truly understood until you have been through the same thing. Her parents were in their late seventies and had long, mostly uneventful lives. My parents were in their early sixties, and their lives were extremely eventful but shorter.

Mama never seemed sadder to me. The worst day was the day she got back from Kentucky after her mother died. She tried to hide it, but even when she smiled, it was as if she had painted that smile on her face.

One evening, she asked me to stay up and watch a movie after the news. We did that sometimes. Undoubtedly, she sometimes did that with my sisters.

Now I realize she was probably having trouble sleeping, and it was a good time to have one-on-one time with each of us girls. Although I don’t think she would have used those words. I always looked at alone time with Mama as fun. This time it wasn’t. But that wasn’t her fault.

She felt she had let her parents down. She hadn’t been back to see them in six years when her mother died. She told me they talked on the phone, but she hadn’t been there to help them when they needed it. I wish I had reminded her that the only way to get where they lived was by train, bus, or car, and she had four kids. Though it probably would not have made any difference.

They wrote lots of letters too. I still have one that my grandmother wrote to her – the last one she wrote. She wrote it on lined paper in pencil – only barely legible now. She told Mama about her sister Anne and her seven kids, what they were doing, and how Grandpa was doing. Her Mama told her how much she loved her and how proud she was of Mama, Daddy, and us girls.

I reminded Mama about sitting on the porch with Grandma while she brushed her long hair and told me the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. She told me the story three times while we sat on the porch swing because I begged her. When I begged for a fourth telling, she said it was unlucky to tell a story more than three times and that I should tell it to my kids because I surely had it memorized by now. She was my first storytelling teacher.

Even though I only saw her three times in my life, she made a big impression. She came to see us when I was probably seven years old. Her youngest son took his wife on a honeymoon to Mexico, and they came through Houston.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night and hearing a loud, scary sound coming from my sister's bed, which now had a large figure in it. I got scared and started crying. She woke up, hugged me, and apologized for scaring me. She had to pee and took me to the bathroom with her, and I sat on the edge of the tub while she relieved herself and told me about her trip from Kentucky. It was the only time she ever left her home state except to cross the Ohio River and visit family in Indiana.

The other two times I saw her, I will save for later.

My favorite story my mother told me about my grandmother was that she was a suffragette in 1904 when she moved to Louisville at eighteen by herself and got a job in a canning factory. She participated in Suffragette marches there. My mother was already three years old when women were finally allowed to vote in 1920.