The farway corner

I hadn't seen Mom Mom in a long time. I'm ashamed of that. She didn't really know I was there, and didn't miss me when I left, but that's not much of an excuse. That doesn't make her any less special or important just because her mental faculties function on a different level now. She's got what is or what seems like Alzheimer's. Still a hard thing to diagnose for those still alive, for reasons you just need to ponder briefly to realize. Finding the real reason a brain stops working normally requires a thorough analysis of that organ.

There's no way to fully tell you about Mom Mom in this space. I also don't know the entire story, not having been around in her early years. She is a middle child among a total of nine children. She married her high school sweetheart. She was born in a tiny shack perched near the water on a tiny island in Virginia. Her family eventually built a larger house across the street. After traveling with her husband during World War II to California, New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and other points, the two returned to the island and built a house ... next to her family's second home.

She is highly intelligent, fiesty, independent, a voracious reader, crossword-puzzle completer, volunteer, Christian, loving wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and someone who could outwalk even the most fit of fiddles. I purposely say "is" here rather than "was," because she still exists. Much of her sharpness is permenantly dulled by her advancing age and condition. That shouldn't change who she really is, how God made her. She was a hot tomato, too. I've seen pictures. It's only sort of creepy to say that about my grandmother.

Knowing what I do, particularly about her fiesty independence, it was really hard to see her a few weeks ago. Her health isn't bad for 89 years old. She can get around her cottage on her own. She eats on her own. I don't want to detract from the dignity she still deserves, so I'll just say I know more about some of her bodily functions (being in the middle of a convo between my mom and one of the attendants) than I ever wanted to know. It was the kind of conversation I had heard my grandmother involved in – to a varying degree – while visiting her mother-in-law in a nursing home so many years ago. How time marches on so cruelly, taking nothing but all of us prisoner.

When my grandfather died in 1980, Mom Mom grieved but pushed forward. She got more involved with her friends and community. She didn't rely on her siblings, mostly because they were and are fairly useless in the love-and-comfort department. She took care of her ailing mother-in-law and tolerated her drunken, ill brother-in-law's pleas for money way too long before it was halted.

She kept a beautiful flower garden around her beautiful home – the one she and Pop Pop built in 1950 – at the corner of Main Street and Ocean Boulevard. There were bushels of vegetables each summer that kept the growing me glowing during summer visits.

That corner seems so far away.