The Parsons Challenge

My grandmother is not dead. Sometimes I forget that. I have to remind myself that she is still with us, the living. The fall and the broken hip sent her away and I let her slip from my consciousness.

I pass her by five days a week on my way to work. Speeding along in my car, oblivious to my surroundings, sucked into my own self-centered world of made up miseries and dramas I see her “home”. The skilled nursing facility jogs my memory. I’m brought abruptly back to the moment.

So involved in my own life I have forgotten hers.

She sits patiently in her wheelchair, quietly watching as the world leaves her behind. What does she have to offer? She’s tired of this “job” and would gladly quit at any time.

If only God would let her.

Still, she waits for me. I try to remember the last time I saw her and I can’t. What day was it? Saturday? Sunday? My life has somehow become more important.

When did Grandma become irrelevant?

When I see her it is not the woman I remember and knew as a child.

The woman I remember would swim with me in mountain lakes on family camping trips. Her soft arms wrapped around my cold, wet little body.

Her warmth would envelop me and make me feel safe.

She sat with me on the back porch after her brain surgery. I see her smile and hear her laugh. We’d pet the cat and talk about our love of animals.

I’d sit and listen to her play Baby Elephant Walk on the organ for the umpteenth time.

She would always play it just for me.

When I was ten Grandma took me to the movies to see Annie. That was the beginning of my love affair with musicals and it was one more thing we had in common.

She braided my hair even though her hands were stiff and arthritic. She didn’t complain.

She did it because she loved me.

How did it come to this? How could I forget her? Where have I been?

I see her hands and think about the life she has lived.

Her hands have held the hands of ancestors that I have never known. They have felt the ancient redwoods of the Pacific Northwest, canned peaches in the farm towns of California, and stacked cords of firewood in the Sierras.

Those beautiful hands have danced with, held, and lost the love of her life.

They are the hands that cared for a husband until he couldn't fight the cancer anymore.

Her hands changed countless diapers of four children who are now grown and have children and grandchildren of their own.

Gentle hands tended and mended skinned knees and bruised egos.

They took care of me.

She takes my hand and gives me a kiss and I thank God that she is still with us, the living.

And I remember

My grandmother is not dead.