Grandma — July 8, 2022 - Johnny Boy Marketing

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Reflections on Grandma 👵
Kids & Death 👨‍👦‍👦
Don’t Say It 🤫

My grandma died yesterday, four days shy of her 96th birthday. As it goes with people at that age, it wasn’t a surprise. She had been fading for more than a year and, though she still was breathing, that version of alive in her final months isn’t what anyone would want for themselves.

Her death marks the final passing of my grandparents and, collectively, the final passing of the grandparents among Wifey Poo and I. My first grandparent died when I was 12. I will turn 48 later this month.

The thing is, I’m not sure what I am feeling right now as I write this. Obviously, there’s a level of sadness, but there’s also something akin to relief that she isn’t suffering anymore. Perhaps my uncertainty with where I stand this morning is due to the fact that any grief I might have had was felt most strongly when Grandma ceased to really be Grandma as her mind slipped. About two months ago, I wrote her a long, long letter to tell her everything I needed to say, but by the time it arrived in the mail, I’m not sure how much of her was truly left to read and understand it. My hope is that it found her in a lucid moment, but I’ll never know.

People are complex, and Grandma was no exception. I hate how dishonest obituaries are with the whole “he was loved by everyone who knew him” stuff, but maybe that’s because I know how many people who have known me don’t love me. Grandma certainly wasn’t loved by everyone who knew her either, so maybe I come by that honestly, or maybe I’m just looking at life honestly. No one who lived and mattered gets away unscathed.

Grandma was incredibly proud of me, her only grandson, and I never doubted for a second that she thought of me as anything other than the best thing since sliced bread, which you have to admit, is pretty cool.

She taught me how to make scrambled eggs with bacon in them. She taught me how to make French toast. She taught me how to put my own damn laundry away. As the story goes, she was taking care of me and Sister while my parents were on vacation, and she did the laundry while I was in school. When I came home, she showed me where it is and told me to put it away. I evidently said something to the effect of “Grandma, that’s woman’s work,” which, in my defense, is something I’m sure Pops had said in my presence as a joke.

Humor is lost on dumb kids sometimes.

She was the young Grandma, the one in old home movies on the sled on the hill in the backyard that seemed so freaking huge when we were kids but wasn’t so much when I saw it on my last return to New York more then a decade ago. (Two decades, could it be?)

Yet Grandma was far from a saint. She had a tumultuous relationship with my aunt — the younger of her two daughter — and was not a good grandmother to the granddaughter from that marriage. Generationally, it might be hard to understand homosexuality, but that doesn’t make it right to not love and accept another human being for who they are.

She was what could be described as an enabler when it came to my grandfather and his alcoholism, which contributed to some of my own really bad childhood memories.

She had on again, off again relationships with her friends and family members, something that is a disturbing part of the female line in our family.

These admissions are perhaps the most honest thing to come out of the darker side of my family and I write them understanding the risk of causing a blowup. But frankly, I’ve reached the point in my life in which I’m sick of the whitewashed version of any history, including my own. Truth is sometimes ugly, and, as with anything I write, this is solely my perspective.

My grandmother was born into a crappy situation. My great-grandmother was a kind old woman who taught me how to play checkers and whose personal belief was that you don’t just let kids win. She was hilarious and uproariously blunt at times.

But that was who she was when I came on the scene.

When Grandma came on the scene, her mother was what you would call a flapper from the 1920s. I’m sure she scandalously showed some ankle from time to time, to say the least. She also dumped Grandma off at a relative’s for several years when Grandma was, like, 5, and this was after they and Grandma’s brother suffered horrific abuse at the hands of a great-grandfather I never knew.

Grandma survived. Great-grandmother got her shit together and ended up providing some stability later in life for her, but to think there wasn’t damage done by that point is to have your head stuck in the sand. For example, I know very little of Grandma’s brother, but what I do know was that he suffered through some extremely unpleasant mental illnesses.

In the wake of Grandma’s death, I’ve been thinking a lot about how impermanent we all are. I have done considerable genealogy work to piece together our family tree, and pretty much anyone who came before my great-grandparents is a mere name and a few dates. There’s precious little about who they were and how they lived.

It would be foolish to say great-grandma woke up one morning and decided to be a crappy parent. Something surely was going on with the people who lived the lives behind those names and dates on the family tree, and the damage inflicted then spiraled down through the decades toward me. Where it started is, at this point, anyone’s guess, but the female line from that branch of the tree is filled with stories of women who did a really poor job of controlling their hands, mouths and emotions and who repeatedly embraced drama like a new lover. In their wake is a battlefield of jagged scars and battered or broken relationships, and it’d be really stupid to think that isn’t continuing today.

Yet my own mother’s life was better than her mother’s, and our lives were better than hers’ when it comes to the worst of the wretched abuses. So in that, Grandma did something good. She broke the worst part of that cycle of extreme abuse and violence.

Being the family writer, I was asked to write Grandma’s obituary. I did the best I could to be fair and honest without being unnecessarily caustic. As I said, I loathe dishonest obituaries that paint a person’s life as a field of a daisies. If such as life has ever happened, I’ve never met the person who led it. So I tried to leave the impression that Grandma saw some shit and did the best she could given the hand she was dealt, and that turned out to be pretty good.

Her life was pocked by the same kind of sludge that seems to stick to all of us by the time we get to and through middle age. But she did a lot of really good things, and one of them was how she loved her grandson.

One of the sucky things about parenting is having to talk to your children about death. Whether it’s the first time a goldfish dies or if it’s a classmate who dies, that chore sucks more than cleaning up their vomit.

Boy The Elder, at 20, could see many of the same things I saw, that Grandma’s death was merciful and that she had done her time here on earth.

Boy The Younger, a newly minted teenager, simply felt the loss. He was with friends most of the day and so didn’t hear the news until around 9 p.m. I was surprised to have him come into my office, where I was quietly pecking away at the keyboard trying to put my thoughts together. BTY is filled past capacity with compassion, so his visit started out as a hug for Dad. It turned into a hug from Dad and a lengthy talk about how we keep people alive even after they’ve gone … by remembering their stories and sharing them with the next generation and impressing upon that next generation how important it is to keep doing the same.

I’m a storyteller. Always have been. I hope BTY will be the same.

Don’t do it. Don’t think it. And certainly don’t say it. I do not want to hear “See, it happens there too!” from one person in the wake of the assassination of the former Japanese prime minister. Of course people shoot people in Japan. They just do it far, far less than people in Amuricah.

Here, there were 12.1 firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people in 2022, with 4.46 of them being homicide and 7.32 being suicide.
In Japan, that rate is 0.06 firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people in 2022, with 0.02 of them being homicide and 0.04 of them being suicide.
In raw numbers, the United States had 40,175 total gun-related deaths in 2022. Japan had 76.

So if you’re even thinking about saying something about gun violence in other countries, please know that you’re an idiot and that the United States is the country with the second most gun deaths for the latest year with data, 2019, behind only Brazil.

Gun control is not the only solution. The fact that far more Amuricahns kill themselves with guns than they do others is indicative of a society gone wrong. But whatever we’re trying ain’t working.

So let’s look at Japan’s model and, hey, here’s an idea, let’s give it a 20-year trial while we simultaneously start addressing other factors that are leading to mass violence and horrific suicide rates.

To legally own a firearm in Japan, you have to …

Take a class, pass a written test and submit paperwork with information about your work, family, education and medical history.
Take a training course that lasts a full day where you learn to shoot at a target.
Once you’ve finally gotten your permit, you must renew it every three years after taking a refresher course and passing another test.

What’s the harm in that, GOPers?

And for the love of God, don’t try to lean on the Second Amendment. It is a completely idiotic argument to think the citizenry having some guns is going to stop a military power like ours that has, like, missiles and tanks and stealth bombers and attack helicopters and battleships and nukes and stuff. Your AR-15 wouldn’t do squat in an uprising against this …

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Grandma — July 8, 2022

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