Caught in the Crossfire

My Dad’s mother Mary Jean died a week ago today, reportedly about 8:30 pm. She died in the same hospital ward where my Dad died almost three years earlier, but she died peacefully in bed whereas Dad collapsed on the floor outside of his room and died with a dozen people trying to revive him, voices raising in anxiety as Mom and I clutched each other in fear. I knew Dad was going, but I didn’t want to believe it. My Mom knew too, and she didn’t want to watch. She went around the corner from him and she sat down on an abandoned hospital bed and sat with her head in her hands.

Grandma didn’t want anyone with her as she died, and I kept her wish until she was unconscious and wasn’t in control anymore. Even then, though, I really didn’t want to be in the room with her; we weren’t close, she didn’t like me, and I really felt nothing at all as her breathing labored, her organs shut down and she passed. I was there to support my brother Bill and my sister Pam, who did evidently care about the event.

It sounds egregious not to care about your grandmother, but it was the truth. She was a difficult human being; she made my Dad’s life extra miserable and I had nothing to say to her in the last few years, and it was mutual.

This grandmother was an enigma to me; I didn’t pretend to know her, but she pretended that she knew me and later in life attributed all sorts of nefarious motives to my actions. I think I saw her about a dozen times, all told, throughout my nearly 50 year history. We didn’t talk on the phone. We rarely exchanged letters.

I never knew when her actual birth year was. Like many in her generation, she was probably born at home and there was no hospital record of her birth. Her birth date was in December, but the year continued to be mysterious. Like many women of her generation she wanted to be older when she was young (so she could get married) and then she wanted to be younger when she was old (to collect Social Security and be on Medicare). Everyone claimed that she was 102 at her death, and that sounds like a good compromise. The range could have been as old as 105 or as young as 100. What it actually was, we’ll never know now. In any event, she was old enough.

My first memory of her was being dropped off at her house on Country Club Road in Eugene. It was a cold, formal, oppressively quiet house with a grandfather clock that ticked ominously in a corner, bursting out in a gonging noise at the top of the hour. It stood a hundred feet tall and mesmerized me until she hissed at me “Don’t Touch Anything!” Everything was white, cold, immaculate, uncomfortable. Our house at home was worn, messy, probably a bit dirty and lived in. We had a noisy chaotic family and no part of the house was off-limit to the sticky curious fingers of young children. To arrive in this mausoleum was a bit much for us youngsters, and it left an indelible impression on me that visits to these grandparents was a hushed event.

A few years ago I read an article in a Catholic magazine disparaging young couples of today for using birth control and not having children – the writer had interviewed one childless couple who reported facetiously that they had just installed white wall-to-wall carpeting and therefore couldn’t have children. When I read that, I burst out laughing because it reminded me of my grandparent’s home on Country Club Road where children really were not welcome.

Mom dropped John and me off to babysit while she grocery shopped, although this was not a normal event. Normally we went with Mom, and why she dropped us off this day is not known to me. Maybe she wanted us to get acquainted. Maybe she was just sick of us. I don’t know. John and me, caught in whatever cross-fire was going on between my parents and grandparents didn’t know what to do or which way to turn. John looked outside and saw a fountain with some sort of stone statuary in it of a young boy peeing in a pond. There were goldfish in the pond. We were country kids and we knew that you fished when you saw fish in a pond. John and I found a string and some sort of paperclip or diaper pin or something and we sat outside fishing in the pond. For some reason I remember John singing a song as he fished. My grandfather appeared about that time bellowing at us that we’d better not be harming his goldfish! I think he was kidding, but he scared the living daylights out of us. It set the tone for our relationship together – John had little to nothing to do with them; I made some attempts to get to know them, but would always be rebuffed.