Small Kindnesses Remembered

December 18th, 2006

My grandmother passed away last night. She was 91 years old.

Small kindnesses when I was a child come back to me now. Grandma had a drawer in her apartment where she kept her small stock of toys. Buttons on strings that you wound and spun. A set of iron horseshoes joined with a small chain, a game of trying to untangle what looks to be an impossible knot in the chain. At some point, Grandma had an ostrich puppet on strings, a fascinating creature with awkward movements made more ungainly by our childish manipulations.

Other memories, mostly from childhood: eating thick wheat pancakes that absorbed syrup faster than I could pour it, set out on heavy blue glass plates that I was afraid I would drop. Arriving one winter’s evening from our rainy home in Oregon and finding snow on the ground, then running about the apartment courtyard throwing snowballs with my cousins. The intense, biting pain of afterwards coming in and warming my gloveless hands.

Later, as a teenager, arguing with my dad and slamming the door at Grandma’s house. He yells, I sulk. Grandma listens and finds a moment to give me quiet words, the words of a peacemaker.

We all find ways of accommodating the circumstances of our lives, bridging the gap between what we expect out of life and the realities of mortality. For as long as I can remember, Grandma was limited by her health. To my young mind, her life was confined, shaped by the walls of her own home and her own reaction to pain and discomfort. Having not yet crossed that bridge, I have little perspective from which to judge her life, other than the trinkets of childhood and stray memories from visits over the years.

“Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.” --- John Muir