God's waiting room

My grandmother died Thursday, in the wee hours of the morning. She was born in December 1911, which would have made her 95. She had severe dementia and had lived in a nursing home for nearly 10 years, the last few in a haze of sedatives. In these times of cancers and heart attacks it’s nearly unheard of, but she died of old age.

She lived virtually her entire life in a small patch of Euphemia Township, leaving her parents’ farm for her husband’s farm down the road, moving to a neighbouring county only when she was placed in the nursing home. She was an only child, well educated for her time and place: she finished high school. She met my grandfather when she was a child attending the one-room schoolhouse; he used to joke that he literally dunked her pigtails in his ink well.

They married late. The photo shows my grandfather standing tall and thin, with a hooded eyelids and a crop of thick, dark hair. (He was exactly the same when died, except he had a crop of thick grey hair.) My grandmother stands beside him, slim and petite, her jet black hair hidden under a hat, a wide smile showing off her perfect teeth. By the time I got to know my grandmother, she was a large woman with grey curls, but she still had those perfect teeth.

Her life revolved around food, mostly the preparation of it. She was an incredible gardener and kept a huge patch of vegetables where we later built a house. There were always peas to shell and French beans to trim and cut. There were turnips and beets, peppers and radishes, lettuce and cabbage and cauliflower. There was corn, which she sheared from the cobs to accommodate my grandfather’s dentures. What couldn’t be eaten fresh or immediately frozen was canned and lined up in her cellar, a rank little cupboard under the stairs. In my mind’s eye, she was always standing near the stove, sometimes gingerly placing Mason jars in a huge black pot, other times pulling from the oven a greasy chicken coated in pepper.

Their farm was Norman Rockwell-esque, with a “gingerbrick” house and a few acres of beans or wheat or corn bordered by a wooded creek that drew deer in the fall and froze to form a skating pond in the winter. In the summer months, in the days before Dad and the orchard came together with a chainsaw and a box of matches, we picked pears and apples for pie, hand-cranking the apple peeler in the yard and throwing the scraps to the big-headed cows that waited by the fence. We diced and squished tomatoes for sauces and juice, sluicing it through a cheesecloth to remove the seeds. Raspberries, strawberries and black currants were turned into jam. Peaches and cherries were pitted and canned.

Back when we kept hens, I can remember sitting with her at a work table set up under a tree in her yard, fishing the guts out of freshly slaughtered chickens, the semi-feral barn cats circling nearby. She had warned me to be careful, because if I punctured one of the organs – the liver, maybe? – it would poison the meat. She always cooked the gizzards, so there was no room for error.

I seem to remember her having a reputation amongst our farming community for being a good cook, although these days a lot of the foods she prepared would be considered too fatty or simple to be impressive. She was a master at the hearty comfort foods that were the mainstay of celebrations, whether Thanksgiving or Easter. She had a huge freezer in the kitchen and another upstairs in the spare bedroom. In one, she kept pies and sticky raisin buns and banana chocolate chip muffins. In the other, she kept frozen meat and vegetables and a package of wagon wheels, a snack food that I’m not even sure they make anymore, that squeezes marshmallow between two chocolate-coated arrowroot biscuits. I have no idea what possessed her to put them in the freezer, but it was the ideal place to keep them: we could sneak up and eat them anytime. I’m not sure how she realized they had all been eaten, but there was always a fresh box.

Some of the sparkle went out of her when she was declared diabetic. She was supposed to control it by diet and for the first few months, the pounds melted away as she measured out quantities of sugar and potatoes, always with a bit of a disappointed sigh.

Grandma’s farmhouse was a mash of clutter and oddities, from the wooden windmill on the TV to the ugly, weirdly painted ceramic bulldog in the spare bedroom. Grandma always referred to the bedrooms as “Shirley’s room” and the “South bedroom” and I swear I was in my late teens before I figured out which was which, such is my sense of direction. Before we moved across the road, we spent nights in Shirley’s room during our visits, and Grandma, ever conscious of the cold, made every effort to cook us alive by tucking us in with two heavy wool blankets and an electric blanket on its highest setting over top of it all just for good measure.

Both Grandma and Grandpa were avid card players and after their boarder taught us the fine art of Euchre, they would take us across the road to the school on Friday nights for community card games. We were never particularly skilled – we helped build the collection of knickknacks by winning the “low score” prizes – but we behaved well. When too few students and too many school board costs closed the school, spelling the end of games night, Grandma burned up the party phone line getting the gossip from her girlfriends, who lived in town and attended a different church but knew most of the same people.

She and my grandfather were married for nearly 50 years and when he died, the routines she had built up began to unravel. She read the paper every day, watched the six o’clock news and always tuned in to hear the obituaries on the noon radio news, but she was never very interested in politics or grain prices or whatever was making headlines. She became a bit forgetful and sentimental in a wonderful way: when we would come to visit, she would feed us pie and tell us stories about Dad, how he failed his driver’s license, how he paid his way through college, the car he was driving when he started dating my mother, how he broke his collarbone twice falling out of the hay loft, how even as a boy he longed to own horses, but Grandma was too afraid of them to permit it. She would often mix up our names, calling me “Sandra-Janet-Lynne-Karen” and on a particularly rattled day, she might throw in Shirley, Doug, Robert or John. Sometimes Tippy, the little dog she’d had for years.

In the days before she entered the home, she became increasingly paranoid and frightened. She fell asleep most nights in front of the TV and was up pottering around in the dark at 4 a.m. She lost her license. Mom started going by extra early to collect her for outings, as she developed a habit of hiding her purse and forgetting where she put it, yet could not be persuaded to leave home without it. I suspected she didn’t know me, but didn’t want to let on.

Dementia turned her into a different person. When she wasn’t heavily sedated, my church-going Grandmother apparently swore like a trucker, wandered and developed an intense hatred for one of the other residents. She lost her teeth and eventually her speech. The last time I saw her – before I moved to Africa nearly three years ago – her sentences trailed off into muffled murmurs. She tried to tell us about a trip to Detroit to pick up a tractor; on the ride home Mom told us that had never happened. They had no idea where these stories were coming from.

So when the nurse called Monday to say Grandma was in distress and seemed to be slipping away, she were summing up the previous decade. She had been slipping away from us for a long time, living in a body that refused to give up, ruled by a mind that had gone long ago.

It is a relief to know she is finally at peace, as my mother says. It’s comforting to know she was not forgotten in God's waiting room after all.