Nanny

  My mother's mother, the only grandparent who was alive during my lifetime, died when I was 12 years old.  My memory is of her sitting by her kitchen table.  In my lifetime, she always used a cane when she walked.  At first I remember her out in the yard with her cane. She'd trained her dog, Tiny, to jump over the cane when she extended it, though he never seemed too pleased to be doing so.  In the years before I turned 12, she gradually gave up much movement and was pretty much confined to her house, as her health declined, by what was then  termed rheumatism.   As far as I can remember, she came one time  with Helen and Matt  to see our house when we moved to the house near the curve outside Valley Falls.  Another time, she went in the car to a funeral, probably her brother's son or some other relative of the Hogan family.  She always wore her hair pinned up on her head, but on this day, we were there as she was getting ready, and I was surprised to see she had very long, snow-white hair.  I thought it looked nice.  
    When we visited "over home" every 2 weeks, in clement weather, we kids always kissed her goodbye when we left.  I remember being really young, and she would do some nursery rhyme, itsy bitsy spider type thing on my leg, and  I felt uncomfortable, near stranger as she was.  But that's pretty much all I knew about her.
     Except, that is, what I overheard.  Nanny had lived a hard life, quite typical I suppose for those times.  She'd  emigrated from Ireland on the heels of the potato famine, married, bore first 5 children, and lost her husband when her then youngest, my mother, was only 9 months old.  She would lose her oldest daughter to the influenza outbreak and her oldest son, a teenager, in a fall from a building where he'd had to work to support the family.  She remarried, had one more child, and then was widowed again.  Each child had to leave school and go to work as soon as they were old enough, as this was before any social services, except the dreaded poor-house. 
    In the Irish tradition, probably also in other ethnicities, it fell to the oldest daughter to stay home to care for the mother and the rest of the family still at home.  In Nanny's tradition, perhaps more universal than just her, the eldest son was expected to go out to work to support the family, and was expected to not marry until after his mother had died.  I think my aunt accepted her lot, but my uncle was more frustrated as I understand it.  However, both fulfilled this obligation. 
    Guilt must have played some role in coordinating expectations at home with worldly enticements though.  More than once, when some problem or deviation arose, I would hear my aunt confiding to my mother that Nanny, despairing, would tell them that when she died not to bother with a funeral but to  just dig a hole and bury her down behind the barn.  At the time, my child's mind thought that might be a possibility, and what Nanny wanted. But now I sense that Nanny was realizing that her only possession, her power as a parent, was slipping away, as it inevitably does, and she was trying to salvage as much as possible through the only means left to her.