Irene

My mom's mother had a massive stroke two weeks ago. It's been very touch and go for her, and very stressful for her children. She was just moved from the hospital to a long term care facility in Lucas, Kansas, where she is almost assured to spend the rest of her life, however long or not that may be. I don't recall much of grandma in my very early life, in fact I think the first memories I have of her a from pictures instead of natural occurring recollection. I remember her arriving and parking with her then (2nd or 3rd) husband Dean near a large tree at our farm house. It seems all my early memories of her are of them parking at that tree and us greeting them.
My first actual honest to god real set in the matter memory of Grandma came a few years later and it's an intense and vivid memory of a trip we took when I was a child. Dean had just passed away, and my mother, and her sister drove all of their children in one car to Pratt, Kansas to attend the funeral. I remember more about that strange trip then I think I remember from anything else that happened in that two year period, and I have no idea why. In thinking back I remember the ridiculous 80's JC penny outfits we bought that we wore on the way down, silly loud colors and really tacky suspenders. Why did devin and I get matching pants? It's a mystery.
We drove my parents olds 98, or was it my Aunts maroon thunderbird? I remember on the way there being passed several times by a purple truck adorned with the name "Plum Crazy", and passing so many custom cutters traveling with combines in convoy.
To my knowledge Dean's was my first funeral. I was very curious about how it would actually feel to be at a real funeral. I heard about them from my cousins and I'd of course seen them on television. I was curious and scared.
Dean was a large man, in my memory he is 6'4". I don't remember a word he ever said to me nor the sound of his voice. I don't think he had much hair and I'm certain he always dressed in brown.
The first memory of my Grandma Irene is this, and I like it very much and I'll not accept any other memory as first. It to me expresses perfectly something about her nature.
Before Dean's service we entered the chapel, it was just my Mother and her Sister Sharon, Devin, Adrienne, Andrea, Travis and I. Maybe the minister was there, he doesn't matter to the memory.
I was a little nervous about the whole new experience that I was in the middle of, but I wasn't that nervous because we had a good camaraderie going on with our cousins, who always seemed to be a bit more bold then I or my siblings. I remember an ugly shade of green used for the carpet of a pretty much un-memorable Midwestern church. Dean had been cremated, and so rather than the large casket at the front of the church there was a table with a brown plastic rectangle sitting upon it. It only now strikes me as funny that the plastic rectangle was brown.

My cousin Andrea and I somehow managed to work up the nerve to go to the front of the chapel near the table holding Dean's cremains, and the urge to pick him up was becoming unbearable. We were that type of children.
Grandma Irene enters my memory in this moment.
Andrea and I are standing there, looking at the box, Grandma, who I am still a little afraid of at this time approaches and picks up the cremains. She then encourages us to pick them up, even shake them. She identifies with our sense of wonder about how heavy it is, and remarks about how a man as large as Dean could have possibly fit inside such a small box. She was not over come with emotion in that moment. She was actually making the entire moment much less mystical and frightening to a child. I'm thankful Irene was the widow of my first funeral as strange as that sounds, but it helped very much to know that she wanted to pick up the box, and that she understood we wanted to also.
As her life has now entered a very different phase I hope for her that she is still able to relate to the world in that special way she demonstrated to me on that day.
I have grown to believe that life and a beautiful dignity exist together, and no matter what society has lead us to think, that dignity cannot to be removed completely, it can be difficult to recognize but it exists weather you can see it or not. I think that my Grandmother always knew that, and that it helped her survive, I know that sense of dignity is still with her now, and that it is still helping.