This past November, my grandmother died. She was the last of the Great Depression generation in my family. Only one person from the family spoke at the Catholic Mass given in her honor (and at her own request). The one person who spoke was also the one person my grandmother feared the most, my aunt. My aunt would have people believe that my grandmother's life was only dedicated solely to the Church, nullifying her ambitions, her passion for the environment, politics and so much more. However, before I get all sentimental, I should note that there is little sentimentality to be given on either account, my grandmother nor my aunt. Propped up by their own lies, it is difficult sympathize with both parties who act simultaneously as the victim and the perpetrator. I'm apt to side with my grandmother for her feebleness in the end. My aunt's brute strength and unbelievable layers of filthy lies manifest and her evil demeanor is always candied in "family" feeling.Long before my grandmother's death, she gave into the many pitches and waves of dementia. She left my family with a bit of hope that we may steal a bit of her each visit, a bit of the past, a bit of our history. All for not. She was stuck in time - 15 years ago, right before my grandfather died. She did not recognize her grandchildren, we had all grown up.
During my Undergraduate career, I wrote a poem discussing the abuses my mother suffered when she was a child by my own grandmother's hand. It is extremely difficult to manage grief and anger at the same person without really being able to manage an outcome on either side. Pity also manages to fit into the equation. My grandfather's affairs, a conniving daughter, a schizophrenic/abusive son, and a unaccountable/socially unresponsive son could break any woman. (I have left out my mother who was a convent dropout with great ambition and my dear Uncle Phil who's dreams have led him to NASA.)
Pity, grief and anger... Where do we go from here?
Product of a Generation
She grew up during the Depression hiding all.
Food.
Money.
Feeling.
Sanity.
80 years, she has surviving that Great Fall.
The bank sends her flowers once a week
and always on holidays.
The doctors tell her she must bathe.
She swabs her underarms
with rubbing alcohol on used cotton balls.
She turns her socks inside out for another day's wear
and neglects the crone-like hair growing from her chin.
At the grocer, an overwhelming smell of putrid sweat
follows her as she tucks a cheese block up her sleeve,
and braces a Virginian ham between her thighs.
Your pen is stifled between her sagging breasts.
She hordes it all in her home.
Expiration dates from 20 years ago
title prescription bottles in her medicine cabinet.
There is fruit rotting under her bed
next to shoe boxes full of money.
Stolen meats are green and rotting in her fridge
and the ketchup turned into blackened vinegar.
The bank sends her flowers once a week
and always on holidays.
She hasn't a dime to spare for her children.
On the sixth anniversary of her daughters husbands death,
she call her,
She wants the funeral money back.
This woman who pushed her daughter
to the ground, throwing her fists
upon her little girl
biting her nose -
she has nothing to give.
This fetid woman
who made her children endure
poverty and beg
could give no maternal warmth
and has stolen all feeling.
The bank sends her flowers once a week
and always on holidays.
(c) Catherine A. Viste
Where do we go from here?
