Growing up, our family was a large and happy one..we children were close in age and therefore never lacked for companionship or friendship. Perhaps that is why it was harder for me to make friends as I had a sister who was just one year younger that I loved to be with. We shared a bedroom and closet all the years we lived at home and never really quarreled or fought. For awhile our baby sister also shared our bedroom--that was 1955.
Mom and Dad sent Nancy and me to Michigan to stay with our paternal grandparents for a few weeks that summer, I was 7 and Nancy was 6. Our grandparents had sold their home in Louisville, Kentucky and moved to Michigan where they built a house on the lake where their summer home was ( and still is). Grandpa had Parkinson's Disease. He was probably about the age I am now, 65.
Grandpa, before he got Parkinson's, with grandma
I remember so well his playing cards with us and trying to play a few board games, too. But he was an old German with that no nonsense attitude and two little girls must have been a bit much for him. Two Mennonite women came to help grandma care for him..he had had some treatments for the disease that left craters in his head--for all the world looking like a picture of the moon..the treatment was attempting to freeze the part of the brain that was supposedly causing the tremors so distinctive of Parkinson's..
Grandma took us strawberry picking that summer and then we made the very best jam ever! They had a big car with automatic windows that Nancy and I were never to "play" with. The temptation was too great though and play with them we did whenever we got the chance. It was rather amusing to see our grandmother getting mad and scolding us.
Not long after our summer there Grandpa entered a nursing home -- and we really did not see him much ever again. We lived in Illinois and he was in Michigan. Once Dad did take us all for a visit. I remember the bad smell and grandpa looking so thin and sad lying in bed. We took him out for a ride in the car. He smiled and talked as best he could, but his hands trembled so and he drooled a lot. Those with Parkinson's produce too much saliva so it spills out of the mouth. Dad had to keep dabbing at his father's mouth to help keep him clean. I could tell he hated to see his father this way.
Grandma stopped going to visit him. It was too hard, I guess. It was easier to just pretend he was doing well. He thought she had died and that he was all alone. He died the year I was a freshman in college. Dad had moved him to our town in Illinois. Nancy entered the Candy Striper program at the hospital so that she could be where he was and be a help to him in his last months. Some years after he died dad told me that he had never told his father that he loved him. It was a bitter regret. He even confessed that when our family dog had died that he had cried more than when his own father had died. This was such a sad and pitiful confession. My own father wanted to be a more loving dad than his own had been and I think in his own way he tried.
He did seem to love Christmas time.. he would take us all for a long car ride on Christmas Eve and pretend he saw "the sleigh" up in the sky.. It was a time I think of him as being fun..they were few and far between! For Christmas my second year in college he gave me an electric typewriter...that was such a special gift and made all my college writing so much easier. After I was married he said he wanted the typewriter back and would I trade him for his old VW bug?? At the time I did not realize what a loving gesture this was--we needed a car and certainly not a typewriter! In his way he was telling me he loved me- even if I wasn't doing just what he had hoped I would do.
Now dad is the one in the nursing home--his hands shake and when I go to visit I often reach for a tissue to dab at the spittle on his chin.. he hasn't been out for a ride in the car for ages as he is wheelchair bound now and it takes two aides to move him anywhere. Some days I just do not want to go to see him and I realize how my grandmother must have felt...I hate seeing him like this. He tries to smile and be amusing and asks about my life and tells me I look nice. I am his link to his "other" life and I feel so inadequate. I want to do something for him--but there is nothing I can do.
He and mom got sick at the same time--she with Alzheimer's and he with dementia..My brother John tried to move them to Colorado where he would have taken care of them along with Nancy and our brother, Bill. But Mom and Dad would have none of it..Finally, as we all realized they were incapable of living alone they came here to Michigan--close to the family cottage and the place where they met and fell in love.
Mom died last January -- thankfully, dad does not have any short term memory so he can be told that mom is out shopping and he is ok with that for a time. He must have missed her too much though because a lady has come to live at the nursing home and she is somewhat like mom; perky, walks with purpose as though she has something important to do, and smiles a lot--dad thinks she is mom. He calls her Barb and sits next to her when she will let him.
This Christmas I wish that dad will soon be with mom again.
On Christmas Day six years ago when we were living in South Bend and mom and dad were still in LaGrange they drove out to spend the holiday with our family. It was on that day that they wanted to take of God's gift of salvation and they did. They surrendered their hearts and wills and bowed the knee to the everlasting God who says that HE will save all who call upon His name. "
For God so loved the
world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in
him should not perish, but have everlasting life." John 3:16
Miss you, Mom.
Dad misses you..
we all miss you..
my decorations are up and we have snow and family coming.
And also all the memories of many, many Christmases when we were all together.
Precious Memories.
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