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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

From July 2006

I wrote this in July but it’s been sitting in a file on my desktop since then. Time to post it.

This past weekend for me was supposed to include four parties, a wedding and volunteering as part of Minneapolis Pride celebrations. Instead, after receiving a phone call from my dad Thursday afternoon, I drove five hours to Milwaukee, cruised on a boat two and a half hours across Lake Michigan, and drove another two hours to my parents’ house to attend my grandmother’s funeral. My parents told me I didn’t have to – she was 93, it was imminent, it’s too far from Minneapolis, etc. etc. I knew that really they wanted me there, and that I wanted to be there, too.

It’s an odd time, when family members pass away. You first have to decide how to grieve. Do you do it loudly? Quietly? Do you play the strong, silent role or the weak, vulnerable role? What are funerals for? To pay tribute to the person who passed away and to remember? To mourn the fact that they’ll no longer be around?

Whenever Grandma Verna saw one her three grandchildren working on a computer, she would point and ask in a curious voice, “What do you have there?”

“It’s a laptop,” we would say, and show her what we were doing, whether it was playing games or editing photos or writing a paper.

Her response was always the same, and always delivered with a tone of surprise. “For heaven’s sakes,” she would say slowly.

Technology never mattered much to our grandmother. In her later years she confused an electric razor with a hair dryer and came close to buzzing off her hair. She did eventually learn to operate the remote control, but only the most basic functions.

What mattered to Grandma were the things that we sometimes take for granted: Friends and family … nature … cooking a meal with vegetables from the garden. She was a constant, quiet and loving presence in our lives. When Ryan was born in 1986, she was the one who stayed with five-year-old Andrea and Aaron while Mom and Dad went to the hospital. A family meal never went by without her help in the kitchen, or her strawberry jam in the freezer. The quilts she made have always warmed our bodies and the angels she crocheted have always adorned our Christmas trees. Early memories are of her walking with us through the yard, stopping along the way to pick blackberries.

Grandma Verna was never loud and she never scolded us with lessons, but as she moved quietly around our house, she taught us what is most important, and it’s not gadgets or the newest CD or even a high salary. It’s the basic things that her life revolved around. She never received a college degree or even a high school diploma, but she instinctively understood what was important and lived that by example, which is what we, as her grandchildren, hope to do, as well.

Posted by Aaron on January 31, 2007 7:56 PM