Today would have been her 88th birthday, so I am dedicating this post to her.
It isn't as though I have been waiting for this day to write about her death as a remembrance or any tribute to her life. Honestly, until now I had no words for this. I had to take time to heal, to shed my anger and shake off the depression that was weighing me down. So it is time that I let this pass and steady myself once again in the current of life, something I have a difficult time doing.
Violet was a soft person. Her sharp features always seemed contradictory to her delicate nature. She was quite and reserved, yet well spoken and pleasant to have conversation with. Her mind was as sharp as a whip and she could regale company with tales of the great Oklahoma dust bowl and the Depression. She was always clear in her mind.
I used to joke that I was grateful for her genes in my family. She was so thin, she was always thin. Never did I see a picture of her where I didn't want to offer her a hamburger. You would want to believe that she was very health conscious and exercised regularly to maintain her toothpick appearance, but that was not the lifestyle she led. Not even close. A typical breakfast for her was an Oatmeal Cream Pie and a bowl of ice cream. She LOVED sweets. I can remember going to her house before elementary school in the morning. At that time she lived next door to us and I would spend the mornings with her and Inspector Gadget before she would walk me to the bus stop. She had a candy jar that was always stocked and kept in my reach on the kitchen counter. I would eat my breakfast and chase it with a heaping handful of Sixlets.
We would then retire to the kitchen table for a game of Chinese checkers or Domino's. Sometimes I would look through old photo albums or scour the living room shelves inquiring as to the relatives unknown to me.
When I was 10 my family moved away from my great-grandma. We moved into the suburbs, less than 5 minutes down the street. We still saw her often.
While I was living in Washington, she moved into my grandparents house. It was time she was taken care of and she was tired of living in a house by herself. We visited very often. She had a chair in the living room that was only hers. She was always sitting in it and if she wasn't sitting in it, she was at the kitchen table, eating her Oatmeal Cream Pie.
She was my great-grandmother, but I always identified her as 'Grandma', she was as much of a grandmother to me as my other grandmothers were. I loved her and her tissue soft skin. I loved her and her over sized sweaters in the heat. I loved her and the wheelchair she led Brae careen around the living room in. I love her still.
I don't know if she was happy. I can't assume that she was enjoying her life, or if she ever had. I want to believe that she was ready to go when her ticket was punched and she left life with a sense of completion. I choose to believe that she is in a good place where she can sit down for a game of Domino's with her husband, who preceded her in death while I was still a young child. I choose to believe that she is at a place that she has all the Oatmeal Cream Pie's she can eat and has enough to share with her parents and friends who left before her.
She was an amazing woman, she remains an amazing memory in my life.
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