For My Nana

If we’re lucky enough, we have at least one special person in our life who has been responsible for the very best parts of us. I was blessed to have my great grandmother. She was my mother’s mother’s mother; I called her ‘Nana’. I was the granddaughter of her Helen, whom she buried at the age of 32. Helen’s only child was my mother, Barbara.

Nana had pale blue eyes that crinkled and lit up when she saw me. She always wore navy blue or black print dresses, and aprons. Before she left the house, she would put on one of her dark felt and velvet hats with tiny veils across the front. Her silver grey, long fine hair was always in a bun in the daytime but at bedtime, in her long cotton nightgown, her hair was long and loose.

When Nana laughed, she held her belly, which shook. I loved to sit on her lap, talk to her and hug her. I studied and memorized every wrinkle of her face, the soft papery texture of her skin, the sound of her voice. She made me feel like I was the most wonderful child that ever lived. We shared a love that was unconditional and incorruptible.

I spent nights in her house in the front corner bedroom with the tall dark wood armoire in the corner and the high bed, snuggled under thick blankets. During the day I followed her through her house with the dainty, painted china cups and saucers in the white corner hutch in the dining room, into the sunroom with the colored glass lamp which sat on the round table, into the parlor with the green couch that she called a settee with doilies on the back that she tatted herself. Down the wooden stairs into the basement we would go, where at the foot of the stairs was an old grandfather clock with a moon and stars on the face. Her wedding portrait from 1904 stood under the stairs and there were old painted wicker Easter baskets with tall round and oval handles on the shelves. There was an old round wringer washer on the right side of the basement and the coal bin in the back corner that I found particularly interesting. Her bathroom with the black and white hexagon tile floors had a claw foot cast iron tub that seemed as large as a boat.

Each day with her was special, just because we were together. She would sing to me ‘Oh Susannah’ or ‘Come Dolly, go to sleep’ in her deep, soft, Czech accented voice.

When I was 11 years old in 1966 she died, rather suddenly at the age of 83.
Something died in me that day; a space that will never be filled, a wound that will never heal. My Nana was gone.

I think of her often and realize she might be sad to think that when I do think of her, I almost always cry, even now, because I miss her so much.

If I had one more day to spend with someone who has passed, it would be to have one more day with my Nana. To walk with her, around her house, the two of us frozen in time. To once more hold her hand and walk with her into her old chicken coop with the old painted cigar boxes full of nails and screws, under the grape arbor from which she made her grape jelly and to eat more raspberries than we picked from the bushes at the back of her yard.

Would I want to spend that day with her talking woman to woman? To share who I am now, a 52 year old married, mother of two who buried her first child as a four-day-old baby? As we grow we get so complicated…

I would choose to be a child with her again. To hold her hand and walk with her, to sit on her lap and hear her stories and her songs and look once more into those laughing blue eyes through the eyes of a child but knowing what I appreciate even more now; the precious gift that she was to me.

This time, I would tell her she meant the world to me, but she always knew that.