Pieces of Me

It’s not often that you have your grandma until you’re 51 years old.  Here I was, June 2024 walking into my grandma’s empty house with my daddy.  She had just passed and we went to take a few remaining things of hers.  She moved to this house when I was 6 months old, so it’s the only home I’ve ever known her to have.  It was incredibly sad walking in and seeing it empty.  Knowing how my dad is not good with death, I had to hold back from crying.  To help ease the mood, I looked at my dad and said “How lucky are we? To have my grandma to 51 and you have your mom to 77 is pretty amazing”.  She was almost 99 when she passed away.  She was the 4^th of 12 children and had lived longer than any of her siblings at that point. My grandfather died at 46 years old leaving my grandma a 46 year old widow with a 7 year old child at home.  She never dated or remarried; I asked her once why and she said “there was no time for a man, I had a child to raise”.  She spent her whole life poor, and I mean really poor. She was born poor, raised poor and spent her adult life poor. She had nothing but a beautiful story of family, love and resilience. What a legacy.

I never really had much of a relationship with my grandma Loewenstine.  My dad traveled from February to October yearly for work. He didn’t get home much, usually for a couple days every 2-3 months.  He missed a lot of important events during those months away (birthdays, holidays, sport events, dance recitals…) but he was home all winter. During the winter months he would take us to see my grandma.  My mom and her didn’t get along well.  There was never really arguing or tension, looking back now I think it was all fabricated by my mom.  She was jealous of my grandma and my dads love for her.  She always blamed my grandma for the lack of relationship. She’d tell us kids she wanted to see my cousins but not us or she was jealous of me or even pointing out how much she gave to my cousins on Christmas as opposed to us. My grandma was very poor; no one got much. My grandparents adopted a daughter 7 years older than me when she was about 9 months old. My mom always said my grandma was jealous that I was a Loewenstine girl and Karen wasn’t.  As a kid you believe what you’re told. 

As I got older and realized I had this grandma that I really didn’t have a relationship with, I decided I was going to create something before it was too late; after all she is my grandma.  We still lived out of state, so I would see her when I went home and mail her care packages and cards. When I went home and went over to see my grandma it would anger my mom.  She would say things like “why do you care, she never cared about you” or “no matter what effort you put in she will never appreciate it or it’ll never be good enough for her”.  At this point in my life she was very open about how much she hated my grandma (of course according to my mom, none of it was her fault it was all my grandmas fault).  I wanted to put that in the past and move forward.  This is my only living grandparent and I wanted to have something with her before it was too late.  We moved back locally and I was able to spend more time with her which infuriated my mom.  Obviously, it was my mom who had jealously problems; not my grandma. Who in the world is jealous of a son’s love for his mother or a child’s love for their grandmother? I just do not get it, well, maybe I do now but didn’t for a long time.

I was however raised very close to my grandma Zink.  We spent a LOT of time together.  She took me on trips, I spent weekends with her, weeks at a time over Christmas break and summer break. I loved her so much. I remember begging my parents to let me live with her for many years.  My mom would often remind me that I didn’t need my dad’s mom, I had her mom who made up for it in every way.  As a kid she was right, she really was amazing and that made up for the hurt feelings as a kid but I still felt a lot of rejection.  My grandma Zink died in 2009 at 94 years old.  It was so tough to lose her and I felt a horrible sense of loneliness once she was gone.