6
April 2003
|
Today, in her honor, I wore a pink shirt to church and slipped her photo into my Bible. Pink was her favorite, and signature, color. Her sister Helen always wore red, and together with their matching silver-white hair, they always looked like a picture. There's only one word to describe my grandmother - jazzy. She used words like "doll" and had an air about her that made you feel like she was perhaps a famous singer and piano player once in another life. Maybe she frequented smoky clubs after long shifts at the Toledo Hospital, until one day she fell in love with a doctor and he made her his wife. I'll never know now. I'll never know what made them run off to the World's Fair and get married. I'll never know how she managed to make being a Divorcee seem elegant and okay, when even as a small girl I knew that it wasn't. I'll never know how she managed such compassion and grace in one of the hardest professions and how she could charm complete strangers with her smile. How she could walk into a room, sit down at a piano and play any song requested. Even after Alzheimer's had taken most of her memory and made her confuse her sons and look at her grandchildren like she was meeting them for the first time, she could play any song you asked. Every Sundays the nurses, this time she was the patient, would walk her over to the piano during "Church." They'd hum the first few bars of "Amazing Grace" or another hymn and then Jean would just play it from there. It was an amazing thing to witness. She was an amazing thing to witness. There are many things I'll never know, but I do know that right now she's all dolled up, tickling the ivories and singing a song from another age. And the Saints truly are marching in.
Jeanette, Helen, Guy, Hazel, Glen and Katherine - 1918
Jean & H - 1978
Jean & H - 1982ish
Jeanette
Elizabeth Manns Join the notify.
|
