Her circle is complete

I buried my grandmother on Thursday afternoon. 

 

She was 95-years-old when she died in the presence of my mother, her only child.

 

She was my favorite grandparent hands down. We formed an indelible bond when I was a child that was never broken. In all my years, no matter what I did, my "Meema" (the name I saddled her with as a young boy - her real name was Bessie) never judged me. I could do no wrong in her grand-matronly eyes. Not that her recent passing was unexpected, as she was very old and fading fast, but it still hurt me at the deepest level of my being, as the sense of loss was real and the lifetime of fond memories that were dredged out from the well of my sub-conscious washed over me with the sad news.

 

My brother and I were two of her pallbearers (a first time experience for us both and I must say, an honor) and the finality of what we were doing as we helped place her casket over the empty grave really hit me. This was it, I thought, the final resting place for a life that began in 1909 (she would have been 96-years-old in September).

 

What a life.

 

As I stood there and stared at that empty hole and her silver casket, the idea that the beautiful person inside had basically seen the entire 20th century pass before her eyes - with all it's trauma's, joy's, technological breakthroughs and wonders - is actually quite incredible, we should all be so lucky to be afforded the same long life. This is a woman who saw her 20's drastically altered by the stock market crash of 1929 and the accompanying Depression that devastated so many. Then as she entered her 30's, the country was off to War in the Atlantic and Pacific. By her mid to late 40's, she would finally see a television; a medium that has completely altered the DNA of every single soul affected by it since its invention - though thankfully her character was fully formed before its soulless intrusion could alter it.

 

All I know is that my Meema was a genuinely good person. I don't say this because she was my grandmother, I say this because she was. I was very lucky to have for a grandparent an almost mythologized American idea of what a grandparent is supposed to look like and be. Childhood summers in the wiregrass country of rural south Georgia visiting my grandparents were a time of real wonder for me. Fishing with bamboo poles out of country ponds for catfish and perch pretending I was Huck Finn; playing with and naming the piglets on the farm (who would grow to be hogs and then our breakfast); eating Meema's homemade flat cornbread and her chicken & dumplings (the best); the endless exploration of tea stained creeks looking under rocks for frogs, snakes and crayfish; scarfing hot boiled peanuts bought from roadside stands by the bucket; sitting on my Popeye's lap and steering his old tractor and beat up red pickup down sandy country roads; the trips into the Okefenokee swamp, the Sewannee, Ocmulgee and Satilla rivers in Popeye's old flat bottom john boat, the one with the sputtering little outboard excited the adventurer in me; the walks into town for errands that always ended with an ice cold bottle of coca-cola (in a real bottle) and all that scorching hot south Georgia weather as the noon sun beat down on my blond head like a mallet pounding dough.

 

My Meema really, really loved me, and in this life, losing a link in that chain of love can tear at the soft fabric of the heart. For no matter where I was in the world, no matter what I was doing, no matter how deep into the dark recesses and dirty corners of existence that I found myself wedged in, I always knew that down there amongst the tall pines of south Georgia, there was one little woman who was praying for me (and whether I believe in what she believed does not really matter as the energy of the universal spirit is enveloping and transcends dogma) and perhaps because of this I was able (up to this point at least) to somehow come out OK, with only a few psychic cuts and bruises to show for my battles waged.

 

I will miss my Meema. I loved her very much. I do hope she found what she was looking for and something tells me she has.