Happy 96th Birthday Grandma

Today would have been my Great Grandma Ruth's 96th birthday. All month I've been looking at her name on my calendar. I'm a card sender and I kept feeling the need to send her card out. But I can't because she passed away in January. I also still have her number in my cell phone and I still remember the last time she called me. I loved that she called in the evening, late in Michigan but early here, because we'd be home. She'd tell me the same story about growing up in Yorba Linda, California and living just down the street from the boy who would become President Richard Nixon every single time we talked. She called more after I moved to California, I think she liked that I was here where she grew up.
These pictures are of a beautiful glass serving tray I bought in June. Grandma always gave presents on holidays, it didn't matter that she didn't have a lot of money, that she was the one who introduced us to government cheese when we were little, she liked to shop and it showed. And once I left home and got a place of my own my gifts changed from shirts and wallets to things for my house. I have a beautiful crystal bowl that I adore. A chip and dip server that comes in handy. Vases and candy dishes and just all sorts of things that are practical but really very nice. She had a sense of style about her.

This past fall grandma had to be moved permanently into a nursing home. She had lived alone for as long as I had known her, my great grandfather died the year I was born, and even though she didn't drive she managed to travel and go out to eat and was really never at home. She had wonderful friends and lived in a nice apartment steps from my grandparents' home. But she was getting older and had some health problems and it was time. So this was the first Christmas we spent without grandma at the table. But we went to visit her a lot over the few weeks I was in Michigan. We took her things for her room, Christmas gifts (she loved yogurt covered pretzels and crossword puzzles), and just sat and listened to her tell the same stories over and over again. But then the day before I was to fly back to California we noticed a change. She was agitated and didn't understand at all why she was there. She wanted to walk and couldn't and it wasn't going well. I left her that day with a hug, a kiss and a heavy heart.

Angela and I flew into LAX late on a Friday night. Saturday morning the phone rang before sunrise. Grandma had passed away. And as I moved through that day, that weekend, that week, very numb I thought about how it was really for the best. She was a free spirit. She missed her home and her life and what she'd been reduced to was not what she had wanted. So she went somewhere better. Someplace where she could be with her beloved Kenneth, have a kitten and gamble the day away.

This glass tray is what I bought with the money I got in my last Christmas card from grandma. I hemmed and hawed over the purchase for six months until Angela grew very aggravated with me. It was only ten dollars but to me it was so much more. I'd look for that perfect thing to spend the money on everywhere we went and I went back to Crate & Barrel several times to look at this piece. It wasn't until my parents visited this summer that we talked and I finally made the decision. It was also then when my mom brought the roses that sit on the tray. They're roses from the arrangement that we sent to grandma's funeral. The funeral I couldn't attend.

It broke my heart knowing I couldn't go back to the funeral. We'd literally just gotten home and the thousand dollars it would cost just wasn't there. But I took comfort in the fact that we'd spent so much time with her at Christmas. That I'd actually hugged and kissed her goodbye instead of just looking at a wooden box.

When my parents visited they not only brought the roses but several other mementos my mom had saved for us. Angela and I both got a cross necklace and a cat figurine (grandma loved cats but couldn't have one). There's a small dish for rings that sits on the kitchen sink window sill that reminds me of her every day and a wooden cross above a bookshelf that keeps watch over the house.

So happy birthday grandma, I know that today you're wearing one of your favorite sweatshirts, watching your programs, working on a crossword puzzle, sneaking a piece of chocolate and enjoying the freedom you deserve. I love you.