This time just a short year ago, my Grandma Ellen was still with us. The Docs had already found the Melanoma in her thumb after a kitchen incident where she had slit the corner of a thumb open on a big splinter when replacing the contact paper in her kitchen cabinets. Her thumb became deformed and refused to heal so she finally went to her Doc after a few weeks, and the rest is the story of the end of Grandma's time on earth. Seems so bland, so anti-dramatic, so undeserving as the last chapter of a Grandmother's life.
And yet there it is.
The Docs told Grandma her kitchen fiasco was a lucky thing because it enabled discovery of the cancer early. We all were a little more grateful and festive at Christmas, feeling as though Grandma had the upper hand and unknowing that 2013 would find that so-called luck, gone.
January came and they took Grandma's thumb and all the Melanoma with it, so they thought. There was shock, denial, and a sense of numbness to life when the tests came back to tell a different story - that the cancer had not only already traveled, but had traveled to both lungs.
We were told we had four months, maybe a bit longer, to have our Grandma.
Living hours and hours away, the entire illness was surreal to me because my life was changing drastically at the same time that hers was ending. I rarely saw Grandma, but when I did, she never really looked "sick". She still laughed, smiled, and had that quick and wicked wit. She looked softer though, as though cancer was slowly deflating her, much like a balloon slowly loses helium; or room temperature imperceptibly melts a stick of butter. Then came the last few, quick weeks.
She was not my Grandma in body, only in her stubborn, feisty spirit when I arrived at her bedside in August. When we all had gathered previously at her house July Fourth, which was the normal, holiday tradition, she had just started oxygen full-time and had then looked a bit thin and pale to me, but I couldn't have guessed how quickly things would change.
I often wish I had a life that would allow for me to go, sit and interview people, much like in the movies or books. I would've loved to ask my grandma many things before she passed on...
*what's it like to lose your other half after fifty years?
•is it lonely every single night?
•what did you love most about grandpa?
Grandma received the diagnosis in January and I didn't see her until Easter. She looked the same at Easter, but she didn't look the same. I just wonder if the remainder of her life was surreal from the point of diagnosis. What began to matter and what stopped? I can guess a few things from what she left behind for certain people, a few crochet and cross-stitch projects she finished, and a few she tried but couldn't that other people finished for her after she left this earth. A baby blanket for her first great-great grandbaby; a 50th wedding anniversary cross-stitched piece for an anniversary a few years away still. These things mattered to her.
Family. Babies. Marriage. And the order those happened wasn't the most important. That's grace.
Now it's Christmas. The first without my Mother's father nor mother. A tough one.
Memories abound.
One thing Grandma always did was make two loaves of Pumpkin Bread for each child's and grand child's family at Christmas. Nobody picked up that task this year. I'm not sure any of us could do justice to Grandma's Pumpkin Bread recipe filled with her love. Made in her old, white, gas oven. Inside the foil pans she bought Family Dollar out of every year. A few of us talked about it. Just talk. Missing Grandma. And that regular plain pumpkin bread. Wrapped in cheap foil.
Nobody took up the task this first year. Too much pain.
As God works, there's been a teacher that has twice sent home a loaf of Pumpkin Bread with Gerald. It's yummy but it's not Grandmas. And that's not important. If only the teacher knew it makes me cry. It's a good thing. Cathartic.
That's the six degrees of Pumpkin Bread. Who would guess how much Pumpkin Bread matters?
Think about that the next time you think some small gift you bring doesn't matter. God's prompting doesn't matter. Food is full of comfort because it contains memories, life, and sustenance.
Gifts matter. Ripple in the pond.
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