Grandparents

[dewline]

puppetmaker tells us that today is Grandparents Day. Currently, it is not officially recognized in Canada. That may change.

I have no living grandparents. The last of them died over twenty years ago in Saskatchewan, if memory serves. My mother was able to go to her funeral, but she was alone in that. The rest of us couldn't.

I miss them all, but for the maternal grandfathers - one by birth, the rest by marriage to that grandmother - that I never got to know. Work was too nasty, brutish and lethal back in those days of my mother's childhood.

Comments

[sabotabby]

I don't know if I have living grandparents. I might have one left.

I was closest to my maternal grandfather. He was a mensch, as they say. Not a perfect person but a kind one.

I had a fraught relationship with my maternal grandmother. She was a hard lady, likely abused and definitely abusive. We got closer in her last year when we moved her to a Toronto nursing home (my family is from Montreal) and I visited her weekly and we did knitting together.

I had a paternal step-grandfather who died of cancer because he was an idiot who thought apricot pits and vegan smoothies would cure him. He has the distinction of being the first person I ever knew to die of woo.

My biological paternal grandfather was a communist and a union organizer named Red. He did six months in jail for hitting a scab over the head with a steel pipe. These are the only good things about him. I only met him once, when I was 12. He was probably involved in organized crime??? He was a tyrant who disowned and reowned his kids to manipulate them. He died and left everything to my half-brother, because I would get married and change my name, whereas my half-brother would continue the family line.

My paternal grandmother may still be alive. She was the town bicycle back in the day and turned into a health nut. She had skin like leather. She could never remember how to spell my name.

[dewline]

I hope your uncertainty resolves soon, and that it gives you some peace of mind either way.

[sabotabby]

I care about her about as much as she cares/cared about me. So I’ll probably never know, and it doesn’t affect my life.

[cmcmck]

I knew all four grandparents although both my grandfathers were colliers and 'black lung' took both of them in my early teens.

'Poor, nasty, brutish and short' indeed. :o(