Her Final Illness
The story goes that when my grandmother was a young mother in Louisiana, she was so opposed to effort of any kind that she drove her car across the street to visit the neighbor. Then her handsome, doting husband up and died and left her with three girls to raise, and she had to take a job-she-never-wanted as a school secretary.
By the time I was in elementary school, she had lived many years–incongruously–in outdoorsy Boulder, Colorado, in a small, lovely apartment paid for by a woman who loved her. She spent most of her day sitting on her couch, reading romance novels, surrounded by her pritty thangs collected from her travels, paid for by the woman who loved her. A mahogany TV cabinet, a large Japanese vase, matching Chinese dragons.
I, raised by socialist-leaning hippies, was fascinated by everything about her. Her Southern-belle musings. “I wish I were drippin’ in diamonds and drivin’ a bottle green Cadillac.” The pink tint of her hair. Her button nose and powdery make up. Her chunky metal necklaces. Her soft belly under wide belts and long tunics. Her “diet,” designed to keep her slim with as little effort as possible: coffee and half a granola bar for breakfast, cheese and crackers for lunch, and popcorn and hard candy in front of the TV for dinner.
Life hadn’t gone as she’d planned, and she figured she’d paid her dues and deserved her leisure. “I wish I were in a wheelchair,” she told me once, when I was ten or eleven. “Then everyone would have to wait on me.” I, who wanted nothing more than to grow into independence, was mystified.
She was surprisingly healthy, but regularly referenced what she called her final illness, her fy-nal iyl-ness. I think she visualized her last days, wilted over a fainting couch, the back of her hand set lightly against her brow–pale, lovely, and doted upon. Fashionable, as she’d always been.
My grandmother had her fy-nal iyl-ness but never knew it. Instead, she slowly lost her memory and then her mind. At the end, she thought she worked in the care facility where she lived. “They just love it when you talk to them,” she drawled, holding my forearm and leaning in conspiratorially. She was proud of her efforts, pleased to put her Southern charm to some good use.
