goodbye again
Mar. 12th, 2014 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaydeefalls
My grandmother died tonight. Which means I've lost all three of my grandparents in a little less than three years. (The fourth died before I was born; never had a chance to think of him as Granddaddy.) I guess that's what growing up is: outliving those who came before.
Grief is weird. I knew how to grieve when Grandpa passed on three years ago; I spoke to him in the hospital the week before, knew he was surrounded by family, read his eulogy at the funeral. (That was a bit surreal. He wrote it himself.) And when my other grandmother, Dottie, died a year and a half ago, it hit me way harder than I was expecting -- partly because I was under a massive amount of bad stress at work as well -- but again, I said my goodbyes (over the phone) a couple of weeks before it happened, and she was surrounded by family, so...good, long life. She knew it was time. She was ready to go.
I don't know how to feel tonight. Grandma was by far the family member I felt closest to as a child. She was pretty much textbook-perfect Jewish grandma. Warm, loving, kind, funny. Excellent cook. Beautiful woman, small and elegant. She always slightly mangled English grammar, but her accent was way more Brooklyn than Polish or Yiddish.
She was born near Warsaw in 1924. She was Ruta then, later Americanized to Ruth. Her mother died shortly thereafter, and her father remarried quickly. It was only many, many years later that she discovered that her stepmother was not in fact her birth mother. Never heard the full story there. It does explain why she doesn't look much like her younger half-siblings. In the early 1930s, her father saw the writing on the wall and got them the hell out of Poland, relocating the family to Palestine. He urged his own brothers and sisters to leave as well -- he was one of eleven siblings. The rest of his family ignored him. None of them survived the Shoah.
I don't know exactly when they moved from Palestine to America, if it was during the war or just after it. I know she met my grandfather at a friend's party, and he'd served in the Navy right up until the end, so at any rate, she was in Brooklyn by 1946. He proposed to her twice before it took. When she accepted him, she went home and showed her papa the engagement ring. He groused that the diamond was too small for him to see. The family never would make the kind of money he'd had Before, in Poland. But that's all right.
She worked at the cosmetics counter in a department store. She was an excellent makeup artist, always helped out with costumes and makeup when her husband got involved in community theater. She loved kids. LOVED kids. After she retired, she spent many, many years volunteering several days a week at a daycare center. When I was a kid, she'd take me along with her, show me the littlest babies, let me help her supervise the three-year-olds. It made me feel responsible and very grown-up. All the kids called her Grandma Ruth.
She traveled all over the world with my grandpa. There are photos of her riding an elephant in Kenya. She was way cooler than I will ever be.
Thirteen years ago, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. My grandfather chose to keep the diagnosis a secret from her, but he told the family. I remember that vividly. It was Passover. I was fifteen. My cousin Chelsea (who was thirteen) and I were absolutely furious with him, and with our parents for going along with it. I remember we locked ourselves in a bathroom and cried together for a long time. As far as I know, no one ever did tell her. She may have figured it out for herself. Or maybe she didn't. Her mind just slowly...faded away.
At a Thanksgiving dinner while I was in college, I talked to her about helping out at daycare, how much I'd enjoyed that as a kid. She didn't remember that I'd ever gone with her. By the time I graduated college, she didn't remember my name, or how I was related to her. Within a year or two, she didn't recognize her husband or daughters, either. Shortly after that, my mother tried to talk with her and thought she was just muttering nonsense. Then she realized it was Yiddish. We'd wondered what language she'd revert to in the end -- Polish, Hebrew, or Yiddish were the top contenders. She hasn't spoken or understood a word in any language in a good four or five years now.
I don't know how to grieve for her now. I feel like I did my grieving in pieces, starting with the diagnosis thirteen years ago. At this point, it's more of a relief than anything else. She's been gone a long time. It just took her body a while to figure that out. There's a reason they call it the Long Goodbye. It's also pretty much my worst nightmare. I last visited her with my mom and aunt...oh, a little less than a year ago, I think. We stopped by Grandpa's grave, then the hospice. She was an empty shell. That's not how she would have wanted to be remembered.
So here's to the elegant woman with the exquisite makeup and the mole on her earlobe that looked like an earring. She made the most amazing apple cake and kreplach, neither of which I'll never be able to recreate because she never, ever wrote a single recipe down, but maybe they're better that way, because in my childhood memories, they'll always just be perfect. Like her.
Grief is weird. I knew how to grieve when Grandpa passed on three years ago; I spoke to him in the hospital the week before, knew he was surrounded by family, read his eulogy at the funeral. (That was a bit surreal. He wrote it himself.) And when my other grandmother, Dottie, died a year and a half ago, it hit me way harder than I was expecting -- partly because I was under a massive amount of bad stress at work as well -- but again, I said my goodbyes (over the phone) a couple of weeks before it happened, and she was surrounded by family, so...good, long life. She knew it was time. She was ready to go.
I don't know how to feel tonight. Grandma was by far the family member I felt closest to as a child. She was pretty much textbook-perfect Jewish grandma. Warm, loving, kind, funny. Excellent cook. Beautiful woman, small and elegant. She always slightly mangled English grammar, but her accent was way more Brooklyn than Polish or Yiddish.
She was born near Warsaw in 1924. She was Ruta then, later Americanized to Ruth. Her mother died shortly thereafter, and her father remarried quickly. It was only many, many years later that she discovered that her stepmother was not in fact her birth mother. Never heard the full story there. It does explain why she doesn't look much like her younger half-siblings. In the early 1930s, her father saw the writing on the wall and got them the hell out of Poland, relocating the family to Palestine. He urged his own brothers and sisters to leave as well -- he was one of eleven siblings. The rest of his family ignored him. None of them survived the Shoah.
I don't know exactly when they moved from Palestine to America, if it was during the war or just after it. I know she met my grandfather at a friend's party, and he'd served in the Navy right up until the end, so at any rate, she was in Brooklyn by 1946. He proposed to her twice before it took. When she accepted him, she went home and showed her papa the engagement ring. He groused that the diamond was too small for him to see. The family never would make the kind of money he'd had Before, in Poland. But that's all right.
She worked at the cosmetics counter in a department store. She was an excellent makeup artist, always helped out with costumes and makeup when her husband got involved in community theater. She loved kids. LOVED kids. After she retired, she spent many, many years volunteering several days a week at a daycare center. When I was a kid, she'd take me along with her, show me the littlest babies, let me help her supervise the three-year-olds. It made me feel responsible and very grown-up. All the kids called her Grandma Ruth.
She traveled all over the world with my grandpa. There are photos of her riding an elephant in Kenya. She was way cooler than I will ever be.
Thirteen years ago, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. My grandfather chose to keep the diagnosis a secret from her, but he told the family. I remember that vividly. It was Passover. I was fifteen. My cousin Chelsea (who was thirteen) and I were absolutely furious with him, and with our parents for going along with it. I remember we locked ourselves in a bathroom and cried together for a long time. As far as I know, no one ever did tell her. She may have figured it out for herself. Or maybe she didn't. Her mind just slowly...faded away.
At a Thanksgiving dinner while I was in college, I talked to her about helping out at daycare, how much I'd enjoyed that as a kid. She didn't remember that I'd ever gone with her. By the time I graduated college, she didn't remember my name, or how I was related to her. Within a year or two, she didn't recognize her husband or daughters, either. Shortly after that, my mother tried to talk with her and thought she was just muttering nonsense. Then she realized it was Yiddish. We'd wondered what language she'd revert to in the end -- Polish, Hebrew, or Yiddish were the top contenders. She hasn't spoken or understood a word in any language in a good four or five years now.
I don't know how to grieve for her now. I feel like I did my grieving in pieces, starting with the diagnosis thirteen years ago. At this point, it's more of a relief than anything else. She's been gone a long time. It just took her body a while to figure that out. There's a reason they call it the Long Goodbye. It's also pretty much my worst nightmare. I last visited her with my mom and aunt...oh, a little less than a year ago, I think. We stopped by Grandpa's grave, then the hospice. She was an empty shell. That's not how she would have wanted to be remembered.
So here's to the elegant woman with the exquisite makeup and the mole on her earlobe that looked like an earring. She made the most amazing apple cake and kreplach, neither of which I'll never be able to recreate because she never, ever wrote a single recipe down, but maybe they're better that way, because in my childhood memories, they'll always just be perfect. Like her.
