When “PawPaw” (my mom’s dad) was stricken with cancer, I visited him in the hospital several times while he was undergoing treatment. I saw the disease gradually whittle down the former Georgia Tech football player — who at one point weighed nearly 350 pounds of muscle and sausage gut — down to about 150. His memory faded along with his body. On one visit, I reminded him how he used to babysit my brother and I while my mom worked, and how I ruined all of his vintage typewriters by banging on the keys, pretending to write something. He was just lucid enough to try to be polite and pretend like he remembered, but I could tell he couldn’t.
The night he died, I wrote a lengthy, graphic account describing what I saw, what other people were doing, and what I was thinking. He was the first person to die that was close to me. We visited him once or twice per month up through when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old and he remarried after his first wife (my mom’s mother) died.
Last Thursday, when MiMaw (my dad’s mom) died, I didn’t write anything. A few months ago she took a fall she never recovered from, and has been virtually comatose in various facilities ever since. She also turned out to have cancer in, I think, her spine of all places. My parents visited her most days, but I could never bring myself to.
MiMaw, like her mother (Mama Mac), had moments where she was impossible to live with or speak with. When she got mad at my dad once, she tore up all her photos of him (some of which were decades-old and irreplaceable) and threw them away. She drove my mom crazy complaining about her various ailments, some of which were real and many of which weren’t. When she got into fights with my parents, she’d try to turn my brother and I against them. Every passing year brought this out a little more in her, and by the time of her fall she’d run off all her friends in Georgia. She wasn’t even welcome in church.
If you’d just met her for the first time, you wouldn’t sense any of this. She came off like any other sweet little old lady from Alabama. And there was a big part of her that was really like that.
Growing up, once per year in the summertime my brother and I would spend a week at her house in Montgomery. My brother enjoyed the attention, while I dreaded going a little. Typically, my dad would drive us there, drop us off, then come back around a week later to pick us up.
Most of what I remember of the drive from Marietta to Montgomery is that I knew we were getting close when we hit a stretch of highway that was lined thick with trees. It was almost like driving into a tunnel. When we reached her exit, there always was a sign for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. To the right, a procession of car dealerships. Left to her house. We’d drive seven or eight miles, pass a mall and an Arby’s with the old-style giant cowboy hat sign on the right (probably 40 feet tall), and when we got to her turn-off there was a pedestrian bridge overhead covered with chain-link fencing. Left again.
I don’t know exactly when her house was built, but I’m guessing the late 1950s or early 1960s. The front yard was a small patch of grass, so the house was relatively close to the road. It was one story, with a carport. The car she owned most of the time I remember with her was a maroon 1986 Oldsmobile. There was a slight odor of gasoline inside. The interior was also a dark maroon cloth, and it was almost always hotter than hell to sit in. Walk past the carport on another small patch of grass to the left, and there was a gate that led to the back yard. She’d wash her clothes in a washing machine in a small room behind the carport and hang them out back on a clothesline to dry.
We slept in the guest bedroom on dusty-smelling beds with yellow wool comforters. One summer I spent most of my week inside that room drawing my own brand of sports car that looked suspiciously like a Ferrari. Even the logo was a knock-off.
We’d watch TV. One summer we brought our Nintendo with us. A few summers, we’d toss baseballs back and forth. She watched soap operas (her “soaps”), and would be quick to explain that she doesn’t approve of the characters’ behavior. Sometimes at night before bed she’d read comics to us (the “funnies”). We’d go the the grocery store or to the mall, where she didn’t mind waiting on us to play arcade games. The first time I saw Mortal Kombat was in the arcade at the mall near her house.
At some point during every trip over there, she’d take us around and show us off to her friends and neighbors. She even introduced us to people who worked at the grocery store. This was the worst part of the trip for me. I hated being paraded around. But few things made her happier than showing us off to people, so I bit my lip and suffered through (mostly).
In the South, everybody’s grandma makes the best pound cake in the world. And MiMaw’s was no exception. More than anything else about those trips, I looked forward to eating the pound cake she made. My mom tried making it a few times, but it never quite came out as good as MiMaw’s. She also happened to make the best fried corn bread in the world, which even she couldn’t duplicate after she moved in with my parents in Marietta since the brand of flour she liked to use wasn’t available in Georgia.
Even before she got too old to take care of herself completely, she was an awful driver. My parents felt my brother and I would be safer with me behind the wheel at 15 with a learner’s permit than they we would be with her driving. And so, for that week, I drove us everywhere. That was the last year we went to visit her before she moved to Marietta. She moved into my parents’ house, sleeping on the fold-out couch bed in the living room while my parents started the process of converting the garage into a mother-in-law suite.
Things were rocky early on, as she wasn’t used to living with other people. Because of the construction on her mother-in-law suite, we couldn’t park our cars in the driveway for a while. We didn’t speak for almost two months once when she insisted on parking her car in a spot that forced me to parallel park my car. Petty disagreements would frequently escalate to the verge of disownment with MiMaw. I can’t believe when I was home for college one summer I actually told her that I don’t believe in God.
She eventually apologized and started parking her car in a different spot.
My dad is so much like her in many ways, and they were like oil and water when they were together. I don’t ever remember relations between them being anything but strained, but when she tore up those childhood photos of him over what I remember being another petty disagreement, she was pretty much dead to him. And I knew it was real because he didn’t get angry when he talked about her from that point on.
But then, I also remember all the birthdays and Christmases when she sent my brother and I cards stuffed with money she couldn’t afford to give us. And how happy she was when we gave her good news about what was going on in our lives. And how awful it made her feel if something bad happened to us. And how she just couldn’t contain herself when someone did something nice for her, even if it was something trivial.
I feel a tinge of guilt about not visiting her after her fall, even though she likely wouldn’t have known I was there. It’s heavy to watch life slowly leave someone’s body. I did it before, but I couldn’t convince myself to do it again.
I’ll be in Montgomery tomorrow for her funeral.
