Woke up this morning to my cell phone ringing, it’s my mom telling me her former mother-in-law died yesterday evening. Weird that my dad wasn’t the one to tell me; then again he’s never been good at communicating heavy stuff like this long-distance. I sort of knew it: I felt it as we drove to the Muse. So I guess I’m going to Portland this week. There’s no one in the world right now I’d want to see more than Dad and Aunt Liz and my cousins Amber and Michael, her only children and grandchildren—and Alyssa and David (Amber’s kids with husband Reese) her great-grandchildren—it’s just been less than a year since I last saw them all, when my dad flew me and my sister up there for Christmas.
I’m not devastated or anything. More like humbled by the thought of her whole life: this woman who raised my father yet has seen me only a handful of times, was she anything like me? It’s true her genes make up no part of me, but still I wonder, personality wise. Born to a Norwegian family, the oldest of three girls, at her maternal grandfather’s farm in Cavalier Co., N. Dakota, a few months before the Great Crash and resulting Depression, her day-to-day environs lookt much different than mine. In time her father became a relatively well-off accountant for the main hospital in Minot, and then, in an effort to dissuade her from settling down with some scruffy townie lowlife, Debbie’s folks sent her to the University of Minnesota as well as on a transatlantic line to visit cousins in Norway. She came back to Minot anyway and married my grandpa Jack (who was not a lowlife but an escapee from a dreadfully dysfunctional Irish and Canadien Catholic family) in ’52, and when he began work as a salesman for Recordak, moved with him to Denver where my aunt was born, then to SLC where my dad was born, then Boise, then Baker, until my grandfather died in ’78, and finally to Greater Portland until just yesterday.
Mom says, “You’re leaving Friday morning and coming right back on Saturday, so pack lightly. And Junie isn’t coming. Your dad couldn’t spring for both of you, so… she’s up in Lebanon with Nana and Papa,” the names we use for her mother and stepfather, a.k.a. our Ohio grandparents. Fine with me. My mother is in the process of selling the house in Malvern. The divorce was finalized in July, but my parents have been separated since my dad moved to Richmond at the end of 2001 to teach at VCU. Now Mom and Junie are moving to southwestern Ohio. And that’s honestly way more of a bummer than my grandma’s death.