Kelli at There’s No Place Like Home hosts the “Show and Tell Friday,” asking “Do you have a something special to share with us? It could be a trinket from grade school, a piece of jewelry, an antique find. Your show and tell can be old or new. Use your imagination and dig through those old boxes in your closet if you have to! Feel free to share pictures and if there’s a story behind your special something, that’s even better! If you would like to join in, all you have to do is post your “Show and Tell” on your blog, copy the post link, come over here and add it to Mr. Linky.“
My mother’s mother passed away when I was about four. A few weeks ago I was thinking about her and realizing how little I actually knew about her as a person, so I wrote to my my aunt, my mother’s sister, and asked her a bunch of questions about her.
I had forgotten about that until my aunt called me this morning (Thursday). Her voice was about the last I had expected to hear when I picked up the phone! We chatted for a while, catching up with various family members, and then she began to answer some of my questions about my grandmother. I had grabbed a pen and tablet of paper and was furiously trying to jot things down as she spoke.
I learned that “Memaw” had always been thin and had gone to college to become a P. E. teacher (somehow I didn’t inherit either of those genes, thinness or athleticism!) She left college to get married. She loved music and played the piano. My aunt said she had a mental image of her mom playing the piano and her dad standing behind her, looking over her shoulder at the music and singing along.
She passed away from cancer when she was only 48. She had ovarian cancer and waited too long to deal with it, then one of her ovaries burst. They did surgery, but the cancer spread to her colon. She had radiation, but they did too much of it and she suffered burns from it. They tried chemotherapy, which at that time they had to sign off on as an experimental procedure. She told my aunt she would have never gone through with the chemo except that Papaw so wanted her to be able to live longer.
Even with feeling so awful and the outlook not very promising, in the hospital she told everyone not to feel sorry for her, because she had gotten to see her kids grow up and to see many of her grandkids. She said, if you want to feel sad for someone, go to the children’s ward.
I so enjoyed not only the conversation with my aunt but getting a better picture in my mind of my grandmother as a person. I’m so glad my aunt took the time to call.
Over the years I have really grown to love the idea of family treasures to pass down to the generations — not expensive things, but sentimental things. I’ve so — not envied, exactly, when I have heard or read other people talking about things passed down from the their loved ones, but just regretted that for various reasons our family has not passed things down or has lost some items along the way during moves. But a few months ago while cleaning out a desk I rediscovered some pictures my mom had sent me before she passed away. These were pictures she had sent to her parents that eventually had gotten back to her after both her parents were gone. In that package was this special picture of my grandparents holding me when I was a baby.
It is a treasure to me not only because of who they are, but because it is one of the few mementos I have of them, made all the more precious to me today because my mental picture has been fleshed out a little more by the conversation today with my dear aunt.
Stray Thoughts 