Grandma Henry

A very belated tribute to my grandmother.  I wrote this in April 2009 and it has been sitting in a file waiting to be shared.

Great Grandma Buchanan, me as a baby and Grandma Henry

Grandma Henry as a young mother with my mother Wilma

Me, Great Grandma Buchanan and Grandma Henry in front of the lilacs at the side of her house in Enid, OK.

My Grandmother Henry died last Christmas, just a couple weeks short of her 95^th birthday.  For several years she had lived in a nursing home, where she gradually got smaller and frailer and less able to get around.  Her mind began to take excursions to other places that weren’t always happy, apparently in search of resolution of earlier pains and wrongs.  When family members would come visit her, she could often surprise us by willfully pulling back to a completely aware present, with wit and insight intact.  But you never knew.  It was also possible to find her fretting over her husband spending the night with some floozy or her grandson selling drugs right outside her window.  The irony being that these things were terrible injustices to my grandfather, who was a rock of love and faithfulness though their long marriage, and to my cousin, whose long distance activities were occasionally irresponsible but a long way from the nefarious things she began to attribute to him.  By the time she died I had begun to pray that an angel would come at night to gather her up in his arms and take her to reunite with the husband she had lost some thirty years before and the son who died about the same time, much too young.  It was a much happier vision than that of the shadow living in her much reduced body.  I could write an entire book about her.  She was not only the matriarch of our family but a strong, no nonsense woman who never quit being compassionate and interested in those around her.  The CNA's in the nursing home would come to fluff her blankets, but mostly to tell her their problems because she was always a listening ear. 

I miss her terribly and find that I grieve for her almost daily in small ways.  She had been only an occasional part of my west coast childhood, but she had played a solid, comforting role in my adulthood since she lived close enough to be able to celebrate holidays with and to be present for the small and large celebrations of my young family.  Today, I found myself thinking of her as I planted the pots of flowers that will border my patio.  I caught myself correcting the label on the plastic pots from the discount store that read “moss rose”.  “That’s not right, it should be rosy moss!” I said to myself.  Because that is what Grandma called it and it grew in the margins of her flower beds at the back of her little house.  When I visited her she would take me on a guided tour to see what was blooming, what had to be divided and what she had put in the ground after cultivating it in the pot all winter long.  She had a fabulous green thumb, mostly the product of the joy she received from growing things and her careful interest in the successes and failures of each year’s garden.  I also pay a small tribute whenever I make her banana bread or vegetable soup recipe; when I use one of the tea towels that she embroidered or when I do an all-too-hasty job of wrapping a gift while remembering the beautiful, creative packages she used to wrap for us all every Christmas.  She was the product of another era, with an eighth grade formal education, but she never lost her interest in learning new things, her willingness to have an adventure or her almost infinite capacity to love and care for those around her.  I hope that I can have the same kind of influence on those around me that she did in all those small but important ways.