my mom called me yesterday afternoon to tell me that my grandmother had passed away in her sleep on tuesday evening. she had fallen ill this past summer, and was never able to fully recuperate. i feel so blessed that d, the girls and i had a visit with her last month on our way to the island. it was brief. i could feel how she was failing. so frail. we didn't take our annual group picture. the one above was taken a year and a half ago. i want to remember her like this.
she had a hard life. her mother died when she was two or three years old. her father didn't know what to do with a little girl on a farm and sent her off to live with relatives in "the city". she returned to rural manitoba and married a cattle farmer with whom she had four children. and then her husband died and she moved away from the farm again - to raise her two sons and two daughters in "the city". they grew up. and she bought a small hobby farm just outside of town where she lived with her two youngest children and raised shetland ponies and sheep. i have vague recollections of riding a ski doo, petting the sheep, and gazing at the large porcelain cow that sat high on a shelf in the corner of her living room. when that became too much, she returned to "the city". to the little yellow house of my memories.
i have vivid and fond memories of her little yellow house in brandon with the fish pond in the back yard. i remember my brother and i falling asleep in her big bed while my parents were out for the evening. i remember eating kentucky fried chicken at her kitchen table. i remember finding an old brownie camera that she let me play with. and i remember her knitting while we listened to old disney records on her turntable. she moved from my hometown in manitoba to british columbia when i was still a young girl. but we would drive to see her every summer. she survived breast cancer, a bad second marriage, and bone cancer. the latter came around the same time i moved to los angeles, and i was generously given a leave so i could go stay with her and help care for her as she struggled to overcome the burden of her chemotherapy. they had wanted to remove her leg. but she wanted to fight. she loved to walk. every day. and couldn't imagine having that taken away. she won that fight. and i won too. an amazing week of stories and time. and advice that true love was more important than anything else. and of course knitting.
my mom was able to spend the last few weeks with her. so fortunate. she told me that as she went in and out of consciousness she would often be completely unaware of her surroundings, and her hands would often be busily knitting the air in front of her while her mind carried her to other times and places. on her final day - she picked up the project she could only see and turned to my mom and said - "It's finished."
