My Grand-mama ain't like yours......pt.1

My grand-ma-ma.

She passed the day after Thanksgiving. This was my father’s mother. Thank you, thank you, thank you (being said in response to the “awwwww….I’m so sorry to hear that” ‘s, but I wasn’t close with her. I wasn’t even remotely fond of her.) It’s a shame really. So, sit back and listen as I unravel my tale. As Zed told me, this needs to be a 3 –4 part series, so henceforth this shall be called:

“My Grandmama ain’t like yours”

I have been off since last Tuesday, the Tuesday after she died to be exact. I got a call from my niece Cher (my older, ½ brother’s daughter, with whom I share paternal bloodlines) on Saturday morning telling me that she had passed the night before). “how?” , “when?”, “what did she die of?” were amongst the first questions to part from my lips. I had many feelings, but the greatest of them was a great bit of nothingness. I had not seen or talked to my grandmother about 10 years.

My niece went on to tell me that the guy that has lived in the 4-family flat (he’s around 45 years old now) and who she had practically looked after so to speak for, forever, had been with her when she died. Come to find out later, she died of a massive heart attack in his girlfriend’s arms. I didn’t feel sad. I felt sorry. Sorry for all the years that could’ve been spent together, rather than apart. But that was the past now. I didn’t cry and have yet to shed a tear, because it’s hard to cry for someone who acted like you didn’t matter for years and who didn’t ever have anything good to say to you.

You see my grandmother and I have never been close. I have always had a difficult and terse relationship with her. I have never felt, nor has she ever been like a “grandmother” to me or my siblings. Her motto: “Don’t come over to my house until you can got to the store and buy me some licka (liquor)”. She was the type of person to dog you, talk about you being too black, (yes, she had a color-complex), too fat, too whatever. If she sees a flaw, she’ll pick it out and dissect it…..right. in. front. of. you. Hmmmmmmm……..sounds like the perfect grandmother to me!

This distance between us was heightened when my father died in 1994. My grandmother was (per my father, brother and sister) NEVER a mother to my father. She had him when she was 16 you see. She was too busy trying to be cute and not have the responsibility of taking care of a child. She ended up having another child after my father. It too was another boy who ended up dying at the age of 7 from stepping on something sharp and rusty and contracting lockjaw. No one knew until it was too late and since we’re talking about the mid-late 30’s, medical help was not what it is now. Though my father always dealt with his mother with a hint of irritation (mainly because at least when I was living there she would call at LEAST 5-7 times a day for N.O.T.H.I.N.G), nevertheless, he did things for her, checked up on her, paid bills for her, ran errands for her and owned the 4-family flat that she lived in which she never had to pay to live in. My father was very good with his hands so whenever things would break or painting needed to be done or a water heater needed to be installed, he always did it. So, the money she earned as a sales person at B.Siegel department store was hers scott-free to run her numbers with.

When I lived with my father for my senior year in high school, because my mom moved to Florida that September, she would call connnnnnstantly and I would talk to her, though I felt NO closeness whatsoever. Prior to moving with my Dad, I had only seen her on holidays or on occasions when my Dad had a cookout and my Mom would bring me over so that I could be around the “other side” of my family. So, here I was a 17 year old and I LITERALLY had never spent a night or even a day with her because “she didn’t do kids”…..HELL, she didn’t raise her own! And she let people know in NO uncertain terms! So, I always felt “weird” and awkward around her. Add to this, she didn’t have a “friendly” or “welcoming” disposition. She was a surly, cursing, fussing about EV-ERY-THANG type of woman. And that was daily. That was just her disposition. But because I was a shy girl (when I was younger that is), all the loud talking and cursing made me uneasy because for as long as I can remember, when I was at home with Mommy, it was just she and I and it was peaceful and quiet. My mother was and is very calm, fairly quiet and slightly reserved. My mother never cursed at me and BARELY cursed around me. If my mother said the word “SHIT”, I would get scared cause I knew it was just that…some “SHIT” for her to utter those words. My mother is a nurturer and a healer by nature and profession (she’s a nurse), and she never stopped me from being around my “Dad’s side” but she never over-encouraged it either. You see, I don’t think that she wanted any of their “loud, obnoxious, trifling, hard-life-living” ways to rub off on me. She was set on protecting me and making sure that I respected my elders, knew right from wrong and grew up to be a lady in every sense of the word and since she was pretty much raising me by herself (cause my father was an alcoholic and SCARCELY could be counted on) she was gong to make DAMN –SURE I was given as much protection as she could provide.

She always made sure I went to see my grandmother and provided gifts and such for she and my father on the appropriate days. My grandmother just never seemed to take a “real interest” in being a “grandmother”. And as I know now, there are just those kinda people who are like that and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles(pun intended…..my grandmother’s nickname was “Cookie”, and everyone called her “Cookie”. Even to me she was known as “Grandma Cookie”).

So, when I received the call, I started to have a regretful feeling that I had not “seen her” since forever and that it was a shame that she had died without her family around her……then I remembered how she acted when my father was dying…….

….to be continued