This is a story I wrote a little over three years ago. But I felt like re-posting it today. As many of you know, I've been listening to gospel non-stop and attempting, in my own way, to move closer to God. Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe I'm getting some sense. I don't know. But something about the music, and the church, make me feel at peace. I worry a lot. But you probably know that. 

I've been listening to all the songs I grew up on in church, either in Vermont Avenue in DC, or at Christ Cornerstone in Detroit. That, and all the songs on WHUR on Sunday Mornings that my mom played in the car on the way to church, or over the house intercom when we didn't make it. 

I stumbled across this version of  It Is Well With My Soul last night and almost lost it. There was this man, Donald Drake (my godfather), in my grandparents church who used to sing this song. Crazy baritone, deeper than Barry White, and he would sing the song with his whole heart right into the microphone, feedback we danged. My grandmother would accompany him on the organ. As Reverend Wheeler used to say, "it was a great something." 

I miss my grandmother. Everytime I heard a good organ or piano (half my Nina Simone obsession is that she reminds me of my grandma on keys) I think of her. I wish Brother Drake had sang "It Is Well" at her funeral, because I knew it was the last time I would be in the Midwest to hear it. (I haven't been back to my grandparents church since she passed.) The choir sang "Order My Steps" instead. I didn't cry when they rolled her body deeper into the casket and closed the lid. I boo-hooed when they got to the chorus:

I want to walk worthy, my calling to fulfill
Yes, order my steps Lord
And I'll do Your blessed will
The world is ever changing
But You are still the same
If You order my steps, I'll praise Your name

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

My grandmother was a little woman. Five feet on a good day and in her glory years, she wore a sensible heel of no more than one inch. She had wide feet so her shoes were rarely fancy, but her church hats were. She had bunches of them—high, big ones— which she kept in boxes in her hall closet. She didn't wear black ever. Not even to funerals. Thought it was a depressing color.

She was married for 63-years and she doted on her husband in a way that only a mythical housewife would. She had dinner ready every night when he came home. Six days a week, she prepared a home-cooked meal and washed dishes (My grandparents didn't get a dishwasher til I was a teenager and even then it was rarely used.) Every Sunday, my grandfather took her out to eat.

My grandfather was attracted to her when they met because she was shaped like a Coca-Cola bottle, he said. She saw him with another woman at a dance and stole him away even though she said he had two left feet. I never saw her dance, but so I heard, she was the woman dancing in the middle of a circle that people formed to watch her get down with the get down. Make no mistake though, she was a church woman. She was attracted to my grandfather's wild streak, which he lost soon after they married. He became a minister. As long as I knew her, she was the First Lady and the Minister of Music of an Eastside church in the Midwest, playing the organ and piano.

She held choir rehearsals on Wednesday nights and I was forced to go when I stayed with my grandparents in the summers. Whenever any of us kids acted up in rehearsal, she threatened, "Act right or I'll break your leg." To my knowledge, she never carried through on that threat... though I believe she would and could have if challenged. She played her organ and piano with passion but she never caught the Holy Ghost. The most emotion you could get out of her was a hand in the air and even those were few and far between.

I spent most summers in the Midwest with my grandparents until I was in my early teens. They lived in a huge house on the West Side with no air-conditioning, cable, VCR or microwave. I started experimenting with hairstyles, spray-on hair color and acrylic nails to ease the boredom. (If I was not a writer, I would very easily be a cosmetologist.) I taught myself how to do crimps, fingerwaves, French rolls, and French manicures in my mother's old bedroom. I also picked up a fondness for Three's Company, Golden Girls, and Gilligan's Island on her ten-inch black and white TV.

My grandmother taught me to make pecan cinnamon rolls, which I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner one summer before I cared about my weight and gained 20 lbs. She also let me eat at McDonald's 3x a day if I so chose, which I often did. She taught me how to silence a screeching smoke alarm by energetically waving an apron underneath it. Her house had a clothing chute where I could drop my dirty clothes and they miraculously ended up washed, folded, and on my bed days later. I was old before I realized she washed them.

She didn't let me listen to secular music on my boom box. If I wanted to hear non-Gospel, I listened to it on my Walkman. I made the mistake of listening to a tape on my cassette player one day and she took the tape and wouldn't give it back. It was a single of Babyface's "Whip Appeal." I didn't know what whip-appeal was until I was much older, but when I figured it out, I understood why she took he single from a 10 year old.

Despite her size, she was feisty one. She drove a shimmering gold, long-body Caddy and when we were headed to the grocery store one day, a man tapped the back of the car with his vehicle. There was no damage, but she got out and told the man it was time for him to go home. He said he would. We got to the store and while we were shopping, we saw him again. She marched right up to him and said, "I thought I told you to go home." The man promptly got out of the line he was in and left the store. I know because we followed him to the front and watched him leave.

Her car was broken into once and we had to take it to the dealership to get fixed with the broken window and glass still scattered all over the backseat. As she got in the car, she pointed to the broken glass, then looked me in the eye and said, "See, a nigga did that." She was quick to call someone she didn't like "a bitch" too and when my Mom and I objected she would give us this all-innocence face and say, "but it's true though."

She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's when I was in my early teens. Initially, it was more annoying and funny than anything to be concerned about. Once a distant uncle brought his new, younger wife to a wedding reception at the church. My grandmother, seated at the head table and never known for holding her tongue, asked loudly, "Who is that woman? That's not his wife!" We quieted her, embarrassed for the poor lady. Five minutes later and louder than before, Grandma asked again. Loud.

She was obsessed with knowing where her purse was. At Vacation Bible School, she would hide it to keep it from being stolen or rummaged though and then forget where she hid it. I often was appointed to find it and she never hid it in the same spot twice. Until she got really sick earlier this year, she stayed obsessed with that dern purse.

When her husband died, her memory was really bad. She still had good days, but not so many anymore. I was in the Midwest for my grandfather's funeral and went to see her at the nursing home. She kept asking for "my honey" and was upset that he was nowhere to be found. My mother had told her a million times "Daddy's gone" and each time my grandmother's face would crack and you could physically see her sorrow overwhelming her. The second time my mother told her in front of me, she crumbled, quickly composed herself (guess who I get the non-emotion thing from?), then said, "Humph. Life... it passes so fast." Then she just stood for a moment in silence. Three minutes later, she asked for her man again. This time, I wouldn't let my Mom tell her that her husband was dead.

When it was time to go, I walked out of the room, and turned to look at her on my way to the door. She was in her own world. I couldn't figure out what was worse— her not knowing that her husband of 63 years was gone or her forever waiting for a man to return that never would? My eyes grazed over the neatly-made, empty bed where my grandfather used to rest when we'd come to visit them. Oustide the room, I slumped against the wall and cried hysterically. Like just plain lost it. I covered my mouth so my grandmother wouldn't hear me.

Two months ago, her doctor discovered she had colon cancer. She was operated on the same day it was discovered. Otherwise, it was feared she would have not made it through the night. Immediately after the operation, my mother was told that the cancer had spread. The doctor didn't know how far and to where. I saw my grandmother three times after that.

A couple weeks after the surgery, I visited her in her nursing home in Maryland. She didn't know who I was though she may have suspected I was one of her three sisters. I walked in— all big blonde hair, loud clicking heels, very appropriate for a nursing home, right? She was in the general room with a bunch of other old folks. They were having a corn shucking contest. She was in her wheelchair at a long table. There was no shucked corn in front of her. I walked up, gave her a kiss on the cheek and she greeted me warmly, but there was no familiarity. "Uh-huh, I thought you looked like one of mine," she said.

We exchanged small talk while a man played a gospel song I didn't recognize on an off-key piano in the corner. When I'd stayed with her during summers, she'd play her piano in the living room. It was loud and she would sing louder. Sometimes she played for practice. Sometimes she played just cause she felt like playing. I wondered if she ever played the piano at her nursing home.

I stayed for 15 minutes and left. On the way out the door, I prayed that God would take me early enough to avoid her ending.

A couple days later, I went back with my Dad. There was some sort of picnic/ fundraiser thing going on at the nursing home. It was 80 degrees and sunny and my dad and I decided we would take her outside in her wheelchair to enjoy the weather. She was eating when we went inside to get her. She greeted us warmly, but again without familiarity and so we let her eat in peace. She always enjoyed her food—especially dessert— albeit very slowly. We left.

Two weeks later she was in the hospital again. She had complications from the surgery and the cancer had spread to her liver. She wouldn't open her eyes even when she was awake. She would talk occasionally, but for some reason, not to my mother. I went home again to see her in the hospital. She looked small and frail and old. Not at all like the vivacious, full-figured woman I grew up knowing. My mother said my grandmother was "suffering." She kept using that word. 

When I went to visit the hospital, my grandmother was laying in bed, panting hard like she had just finished a marathon. My mom tried to get her to talk to us. She would open her eyes and look around wildly for a moment — looking, but not really seeing— then she closed them again. On the way out, my mom said it seemed like my grandmother was doing okay. I figured this was some sort of coping mechanism and she couldn't handle the reality of the situation. Both parents pasing two years apart? That's a lot. I tried not to look at my Mom like she was crazy.

I left the hospital in a seperate car and I was very disturbed. My mother had let me push the BMW for only the second time. I'd been itching to get it open on the Beltway. Instead, I drove home down a two-lane road
doing the speed-limit. I tested the speakers, blasting my iPod and dancing wildly in my seat. If my mother was entitled to live in denial. I was entitled to shake my shimmy. We all handle grief differently.

That was the last time I saw my grandmother alive. I returned to New York. She was released from the hospital again and sent back the next morning. Released again. And sent back the next morning. My mother called me yesterday afternoon and we talked about putting her in a hospice. But she did not want to 'kill' her mother by sending her there. I told my Mom to be still and let God instruct her as to what to do. My mother told me if she was ever in that predicament that I should have her drugged up or "pull the plug." She did not want to suffer. 

Last night, my mother went to the hospital. My grandmother was awake, eyes open. She finally talked to my mother a bit, told her she was not in any pain. She asked about me. My mother told her I lived in New York and I'd grown up to be a nice young lady. They chatted some more, then Grandma went to sleep.

God took my grandmother Home last night around 7:30PM.

Fin.