Tribute to a wonderful woman - my grandmother

My grandmother would have been 86 today. A few years back she lost her battle with cancer. What was scary was it was sudden, within a week or so that we even had learned about it. What was a blessing was that we were able to be with her through it.

I feel so fortunate to have known my grandmother as the woman she was. After my mom’s divorce my sister, mother and I moved in with her and my aunt and lived the next 9 years together. My grandmother was an amazing woman who I do not know that I fully appreciated during those early years.

• She was a mother to five daughters, grandmother to nine grandchildren.
• She was incredibly dependable. Her word was golden to us. She was always there for us when we would get home from school.
• She was very private, seeing her cry always made you take pause and wonder what was hurting her.
• She hated eating noises with a passion. I remember eating a carrot (the noisiest of the noisiest things) in the living room and feeling her eyes on me. Crunching as quietly as I could, she would say oh just hurry it up will you.
• Her favorite expressions were crime-a-nuttly! and loved calling people turkeys on the road.
• She was tiny and loved her heels. I often wondered how she had such tall daughters and granddaughters, she was so small.
• She said how did that happen, when I called to announce I was pregnant with my son. She was proud but having a son, was pretty uncommon in our family that has a great number of females.
• My sister and I would play spiders and climb up to the ceiling in the hallway as she would pass by. We would drop down behind her and give her a scare. She put up with so much.
• She hand wrote and sent my sister and I letters every week without fail when we moved out. She included Snoopy stickers, celebration stickers, exclamation stickers, you name it to express her mood throughout the letters and envelopes.
• She was a die hard Republican and hand wrote her politicians every opportunity she could. She would get passionate and mad at the television as she saw the screw ups her politicians were making. She had personalized political stickers printed up and put them on every piece of mail she sent, even handed them out to others in the public service to include on their correspondence.
• She was a wife and mother from WWII and believed her girls should be strong. She had little tolerance for weakness or self pity.
• She had amazing skin, always healthy, glowing, very few wrinkles.
• She was always by the phone whenever you needed to talk and always had the answer whenever you needed a birthday, an anniversary, a who did that when, any piece of information you could think of.
• She instilled tradition by making sure we had a Christmas tree every year, had celebrations for every major holiday.
• She changed her sheets to match the season, match the holiday throughout the year.
• She never made us brownies or cookies or did the things I thought a grandmother should do while growing up.

One thing she did without a doubt is leave an incredible impression on the women in her life. Her strength, sense of self, values run deep. While she was a tough woman on the outside, she was full of passion beneath. I feel thankful to have known her as I did and miss her dearly.

Happy Birthday Grandma, we miss you.

-njppa

Tags: memories, tribute, women

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