1998

Grandma Junior

When Mom and Dad were home and not at their summer place in North Carolina, Mom would go feed her Grandma Junior once or twice a week. In April Mom wrote in her diary…  

My turn to feed mom on the 18 & 19th. She is getting weaker and weaker.  She doesn’t talk much anymore.  She won’t get out of bed, eats very little and is almost skin & bone.  It so sad I could cry when I’m there.  Sue, Dixie, Carole, Cork, Joshua & Gary all took turns too.

When I went back to Gainesville in June for the family reunion, she was not well enough to go to attend. When Mom asked me if I wanted to visit Grandma in the nursing home I said no, I didn’t want to see her the way she was, I wanted to remember her as I last saw her. Even that memory was not happy for me as the last time I saw Grandma Junior was at the family reunion back in ’95 when she was in a wheelchair, and I felt really bad for her then. No, I didn’t want to see her now, all shriveled up, a ghost of her former self.

Grandma Mixson

Mom and Dad with Grandma outside the assisted living home

The end of June, at the age of 97, Grandma Mixson moved to the Good Samaritan Assisted Living Home in Williston. Grandma had been living alone the past twenty years, since her second husband, Mr. Yawn, died back in 1978. Having never driven a car, she did quite well with her many friends and family taking to buy groceries and other errands, but in the last year she was becoming forgetful, like putting a pot of soup on the stove and then forgetting about it until the soup burned up and set off the smoke alarm. Grandma was hesitant to go to the assisted living home, but in the end accepted that she couldn’t live alone any longer. At least in was in the nearby town of Williston so many of her friends could still visit her.  
 
After 97 years of living it was kind of sad to see all of Grandma’s possessions come down to a couple of suitcases as that was all she was allowed to take to the assisted living home. The remainder of her things were divided up amongst family or thrown away. Dad and his brother Arnold took some things. Dad saved a hundred year old chair that was made by Grandma’s grandfather, her little brown teapot that she used to keep egg money in, her antique sewing machine, and a few other things. Grandma loved to crochet there was a stack of fifty or more dollies that Grandma had made over the years, I got a few of them.  As for the house and furniture, well it didn’t belong to Grandma, it belonged to Mr. Yawn’s children which, per his will, Grandma could stay in it as long as she liked which Mr. Yawn’s children (other than Billy Yawn, Dad’s good friend) were never happy about. They finally got their due share although three of the sons had passed away by this time, Grandma outliving them all.
 
In the next few years, when I would visit Mom and Dad, we would usually on a Sunday go out and take Grandma to breakfast or lunch. The Good Samaritan Assisted Living Home was a nice enough place, it was clean, smelled ok, a sort of musty old people smell. Grandma originally shared a room with another woman who Grandma said was crazy and she was stealing Grandmas thing saying they were hers. After the staff checked into to it and found it to be true, they moved Grandma to a single room that had come open. By “come open” it was understood to mean that someone had died, a regular occurrence in such a place.  Grandma’s room was small, ten by six feet or so with no windows, a single bed, nightstand, dress and chair, there wasn’t much room for anything else. There were probably forty or so patients, old people everywhere, sitting in chairs staring off into space, shuffling down the halls in their pajamas, or sitting in small groups playing some card game at a table. All patients seem to know and like Grandma and they all called her Granny as even though most of them were their seventies or even eighties, Grandma was older than any of them. 
 
Although Grandma complained about the place the first year, I think she grew to like it for it provided her with everyday company and friends that she didn’t have living alone.

Monster