Grandma

Some days, I shock myself at how much I miss my grandma. For a very long time when I was little, we didn’t get along. She was very German and while not overly strict, I just knew never to be bad around her and that’s very hard to do as a little girl sometimes. Grandma was very set in her ways and the house was always impeccably clean and she always made sure to have coffee and cookies ready for company on Sundays.

Eventually (and thankfully) we became close and I appreciated all her qualities even if I didn’t understand them as a little girl. 

December 19, 1993 - 1st member of the family to graduate college

 

Grandma came over on the boat with my great-grandfather in 1913 and was only allowed to go to school through the 8^th grade. She married my grandfather, gave birth to only one surviving child, became a US citizen in her forties, and learned to drive for the first time when she was over 65. She was a hard worker and good cook and liked to crochet and make quilts. She was a farm wife who survived two types of cancer and many, many days in the hospital when her body seemed to revolt on her in the early 1980’s (she recovered). She had a typical German heart – hard at first glance but then softness would slowly reveal itself.

Her first ride in the air was the day she had a massive heart attack and had to be airlifted to Sioux City. She struggled for a week until finally passing and we buried her in a heavy snowstorm next to my grandfather in tiny Linn Grove. The town was her home for the last twenty years of her life after moving ‘to town’ after my grandpa died. I loved when I would spend a week with her during the summer. I would ride my bike all over town (it only had maybe six streets) and I sometimes was allowed to help the elderly librarian at the town’s miniscule public library. My favorite part, besides being with my grandma, were the chocolate malts at the small restaurant on the main drag.

It wasn’t until the last couple of weeks have I truly understood why I miss her so much and it’s for a very selfish reason – my grandma, even with her German heart, was and is the only person who truly ever made me feel special.

I really think that as humans, we have a strong desire to have someone think the world of us. So much so that they support us without question, truly tell us they love us (and don’t phone those words in), and see us beyond our faults and insecurities. That someone makes our ordinary days extraordinary and always remembers the special days like birthdays.

A majority of people get the above through the usual suspects – caring parents, significant others, and close friends – but on occasion, there are people like me who don’t have those individuals. That’s life; it’s not all about rainbows and unicorns but there’s a part of our souls that need to feel special. I’m not saying we need to have the world revolve around us. All I’m saying is that on occasion, we need to have someone take a step further and care with more than just empty and automatic words.

We need someone to be by our side, holding our hand, during the troubled days. We need to hear someone say with heart (and not in regurgitation) that things may be tough now but that they will get better. We don’t need people to just agree with us that life sucks; we need people to show us that life doesn’t suck. We need people to check in on us or at least inquire if we’re okay. We just want to feel that we matter in this world somehow to someone. Truly matter. Proactive actions speak so much louder than just reactive actions.

We want someone to at least remember us.

My grandma always made sure I had something special on the dinner table when we would go visit her on Sundays. Usually, it was either her awesome baked beans or Great Northern beans and she always made sure my little bean bowl was set at my place. One of the saddest days was the Sunday that the bean bowl broke. I had used it for over twenty years.

Grandma was on a very fixed income but those cards she sent me on Valentine’s Day and my birthday with $5 inside meant the world to me. At Easter she would buy me my own box of Russell Stover candies that I did not have to share (a dream for any fat girl like me). Christmas always brought a $25 gift. Grandma would send the money to my parents and they would buy something ‘in the city’ but the two Christmas gifts I dearly loved for a long time were the two she purchased on her own. One was a sleeping bag in the shape of a Hershey’s chocolate bar and the other was a butt ugly maroon and white mushroom-shaped lamp. For whatever reason, I loved those things dearly and used the sleeping bag until it was in tatters and the lamp until it stopped working.

Grandma noted my birth in one of her farm journals.

 

When she found out I wanted to be a writer, she was the only person in my family who seemed interested in this. She would send me little cutouts about where I could send poems in to get published.  

When I was born, she made two baby quilts for me. I still have one but the other I passed on to a former student of mine who was having her own little baby. Her parents were not happy at all about the situation and I saw how it hurt her. What was done was done and I just wanted her to feel special during such a rough period of her life. The print on the quilt had giraffes and when V saw them, she was so very happy. They’re my favorite, she had said in a voice that belied the gritty façade she put on so often.

Grandma passed in January 1996 and as I said, it wasn’t until these last couple of gray weeks did I realize the reason why I missed her so. I thought of her carefully chosen birthday cards and how she always signed them in her unique cursive – Love, Grandma. She never forgot about me. She saw me; I was never invisible around her. When she asked how I was, she actually wanted to know.

 Elsa (she would become simply Elsie when she became a citizen) Bina Gerhardina Schroeder Timmons was the only person who really cared for me and made me feel special.

When you realize that you really don’t have anyone that cares for you, it really hurts. What little self-worth you have disappears along with any energy you have to care about yourself. You stop trying to better yourself and you find no joy in things that used to soothe you. You don’t care if any progress you’ve made is slowly regressing. When you realize you matter to no one, you become even invisible to yourself. That teeny tiny hope you were trying to hold onto that maybe someday someone might care for you vanishes. The loneliness you’ve felt takes on a whole new look.