A Story to Tell: Thanking God for the Hard Parts

I submitted this piece about my grandma, Margaret Ruth Barnes (11-15-24 to 12-17-12), to a Ladies Home Journal writing contest while she was still living.  It didn't win but I thought it was a fitting tribute to a lady who taught me how to play Canasta, and Karem, and how to make noodles. I learned to ride my bicycle in her drive way.  She took me to Branson to see Shoji Tibouchi when I was in grade school.  She rocked me in her easy chair the night I threw up in her house even though I had already grown taller than her.  She "clouded up and rained all over me" when I deserved it and always gave me Edy's ice cream with chocolate syrup to make up for it.  She was a complex woman and love seemed to be hard for her with some people but she was a pretty awesome grandma. I will miss her.

We walked, hand in hand, down the wide white hallway.  Being in this place makes me uneasy.  Perhaps it’s the smell of urine that makes my eyes sting.  Or the men and women we steal glances at as we walk past their open doors.  Some of them stare back at us as we pass.  Anyone who is left in their room at dinnertime is confined to their bed.  I can’t imagine what goes on in their minds, hour after hour, day after day.  I see them with their hair matted and spittle on their chins, legs twisted and lifeless in the beds.  Their eyes are sometimes dull and glazed, sometimes confused and crazy.  In the split second that I spy on them as I pass their rooms, I try to imagine what they were like when they were young, vibrant, healthy, and beautiful.  I wonder what kinds of things they did with their lives, how many kids they raised, what adventures they went on, and if there is anyone left to tell their stories.

It makes me sad to think of this Greatest Generation leaving our world one by one.  There will never be another like it.  They were shaped and molded by hardship.  It made them strong and self-sacrificing.  They knew what it was to survive on next to nothing.  And when they had plenty, they were grateful for it and didn’t squander it.  But it was the hardship they endured that gave purpose and meaning to their lives.  Overcoming it gave them a story to tell.

Finally in the dining room, I spot her from across the room, even though all that is visible of her is her tiny head, with her soft white “teased and set” hair peeking out above her wheelchair.  We come around her chair to greet her and her eyes light up in recognition as always, though I’m not convinced she could actually tell us our names.  I don’t ask her to.  I don’t want her to feel bad.  She is wearing a crocheted red sweater and holding a stuffed dog in her lap.  I don’t know who gave her that dog but I’ve never seen her without it when I’ve come to visit her here.

I pull up heavy chairs, scraping them along the tiled floor so that we can sit close to her, despite the plate of pulled meat and green beans that has been placed in front of her.  “How are you, Grandma?” I ask her.  She shrugs her shoulders and smiles, giving me a garbled response that I can’t quite make out.  Her dentures don’t fit inside her mouth anymore so they nearly fall out whenever she tries to form words.  I just smile and nod.

“Three pretty girls,” she says, looking at my daughters.

“Yes,” I tell her.  Placing a hand on each of their heads, I say, “Allison is in second grade, Rachel is in Kindergarten, and Morgan is about to turn three!”  She puts a hand over her mouth as if to feign surprise. 

“Really?” she asks.  “They grow so fast.”  Again, I smile and nod.  I don’t really have any other news.  At least none that I want to share with my grandma, who I’m not convinced yet, knows who I am.  I don’t feel like telling her that my husband lost his job last week.  For the second time in three years.  What difference would it make to her that we had blown our savings getting us through the last time he was unemployed and, having struggled with a decline in income, hadn’t built it back up yet?  Would she care that we didn’t know if we would be able to make our house payment this month?  That there was no way our house was going to sell in this market anyway?  That unemployment was hovering above 9% and it could be a very long, very uncertain, and very painful time ahead of us?

Lost in the thoughts of my own troubles, my mind is yanked back into the dining room when I overhear one of the nurses on duty refer to another one as Shorty.  “Who is Shorty?” I ask, looking between them.  The petite middle-aged woman who is feeding a patient next to my grandma looks over at me and says, “That’s me!”

“Margaret’s husband was called Shorty almost all of his life,” I tell her.

“Is that so?” she asks, continuing to feed her patient.  I begin to tell her how I once found an old high school English textbook of my granddad’s copyrighted in 1934, in which a friend had doodled a face behind bars and jokingly wrote underneath, “Shorty in 15 years” but my story fades when I see that she doesn’t seem all that interested.  That picture has always fascinated me because I never knew much about my grandparents.  I knew they were my dad’s parents; two kind and generous old people whom I stayed with every once in a while and saw on holidays.  They were wonderful grandparents and very much loved.  But they didn’t often speak of their early life and so much of what made them who they were always remained a mystery to me.

I know just a few things about my grandma.  I know that she grew up very poor during the worst of the Great Depression.  She told me once that when she was a young girl she shared a table with another little girl who ate an orange with her lunch.  My grandma had never tasted an orange and the sight and smell of that orange had her transfixed.  When the girl left the table, leaving behind the orange peelings, my grandma ate them.

I know that when she was 16 in 1939 her parents told her she was old enough to take care of herself and not to come home from school.  So she didn’t.  She stayed on the bus that day until the route was finished.  The bus driver asked if she had anywhere to go.  She said she didn’t, so he and his wife took her in and finished raising her.  She learned to drive a stick shift by driving that big old school bus and once told my sister and me that’s why she preferred to drive an automatic.  The wife of that bus driver would later come to be known by us grandkids as “Granny” and she would spend her last years in the care of my grandparents.

I have no idea how Grandma met Granddad but at some point after marrying him, she put herself through beauty school and opened a beauty shop.  She was a working mother and an entrepreneur long before Women’s Lib.  I find this ironic since I sit here, privileged to be born into a world with “equal pay” and I choose to stay home with my girls.  I have no memories of that beauty shop she owned.  By the time I came along a generation later she had semi-retired and was servicing a few loyal customers out of her basement.

My grandparents must have been very successful in life.  They seemed positively rich to us kids.  They certainly did to me now that I sat in front of her as a grown-up, feeling decidedly unsuccessful in life at the moment.  Grandma and Granddad nearly doubled the square footage of their house with a massive renovation.  And they enjoyed traveling a great deal.  They went to Hawaii, Europe, Nova Scotia, and made many weekend trips to Branson, sometimes even taking a few lucky grandkids along.  She brought two little Hawaiian dresses, one red and one blue, back from their trip to the Island for my sister and me.  I had just told my own daughters about those dresses I remembered so vividly from my childhood a few days before so I asked my grandma if she remembered taking that trip all those years ago.

She didn’t.  Did she remember the trip to Europe?  She shook her head no.  All those tour bus trips with your friend, Naomi?  No.  I leaned back in my chair, surprised and disappointed that she had no stories to share.  More than that though, I was sad.  I studied her tiny, fragile, shell of a body, bent over from osteoporosis.  Her hands which had once performed magic on ladies’ permed hair were arthritic and bony, with skin so translucent I could practically see through it.  Once so strong and capable, she had spent a lifetime working, sacrificing, and saving so that she could enjoy the pleasure and luxury of travel and now she didn’t even have a single memory of it.

We left the nursing home after a bit more small talk.  She probably wouldn’t remember we were there so one of my daughters left a homemade picture on her nightstand. 

I pondered that sad conversation often over the next few days.  I couldn’t resist making the comparison: my husband and I are in our 30’s and practically starting over from scratch.  Again.  We may never achieve the wealth and luxury that my grandparents enjoyed.  At least it feels like it in this scary and uncertain moment in time.  My grandparents knew fear and uncertainty very well early in their days but they spent the rest of their lives making sure they never would again. 

Grandma, like me, wanted security.  She pursued it with tenacity because the avoidance of pain was the topmost priority.  And when she achieved it, she rested comfortably in it and lived as if she had never experienced life any other way.  She never really wanted to tell the stories of her youth, the really good stories of overcoming hardship, stories about the things that shaped her.  She only leaked out little bits here and there, leaving us to piece together the picture of her early life.  But today, in the final chapters of her life, those are the parts that really matter.  The trips to Hawaii and Europe have all but faded from memory.  Just like the house, the pinnacle of all they had worked to accomplish. 

Grandma and Granddad had always taken immaculate care of their stately post-war 60’s style ranch.  A quick drive past it today reveals the shrubs, which once sat at attention, crisp, and horizontal against the white siding, are now dead and bare.  The birdbath in the front yard has been knocked over.  A large tree has fallen in the backyard and its dried dead branches hang over the mangled chain-link fence like giant brown, bony fingers.  Their once lovely home with its paid off mortgage, a tangible symbol of comfort and security, now sits in disrepair, abandoned and literally crumbling down with rust, rot, and time.  As if it never even mattered.

Could it be possible that this time of hardship that I am living in right now is what really matters in my life?  No one will remember how many vacations we took or how much comfort and security we had.  I won’t even remember them if my grandma’s state is any indication of the future that awaits me.  But there is a reason that the “stuff” that gives us comfort and security in this world is so quickly forgotten.  Those things are boring.  They don’t make for a good story.  They don’t shape anybody.  And pursuing them will only blind me to the bigger story that is being written for my family today.  We will one day tell a story from this time in our lives that will be about hardship and pain.  But it will also be a story that is about more than personal comfort, self-gratification, and the false sense of security in a world that will pull the rug out from under you at any moment.  It is a story in which life is meaningful without that stuff.  And if a life that experiences pain is meaningful, then the pain must have meaning because it helps to shape the characters in the story of that meaningful life.  The stories from my grandma’s early life and others of her generation prove this to be true. 

If you believe in something greater than yourself, then you can trust that it is God, the greatest storyteller of all, who writes the uncertainty and pain into the stories of our lives.  He does this not because he is cruel and mean-spirited, but because he wants our lives to be filled with meaning and purpose instead of just “stuff.”  Our desperate attempts to avoid pain and seek comfort rob us of the potential greatness of our lives.  The lack of stories from my grandma’s later life proves this to be true. 

Knowing this doesn’t make it easy to live through the painful parts of our stories. I freely admit that I dread the coming months of uncertainty for my family.  So, in order to survive them and not let them destroy me, I have to surrender them to God, trusting that he will bring meaning from them, that something beautiful will come from them.  That beautiful thing may not be a paid for home and a trip to Hawaii.  I think it will be even more wonderful than that. 

I think it will be a story of redemption—a story of a family changed, made stronger, made better.  Comfort and security don’t change people.  It’s the pain that occurs in the darkness of night that changes people.  As long as I have the hope of redemption—that the story will end well—I can endure pain, loss, even suffering.  Indeed, I can be fulfilled by it, knowing that true and lasting joy, not the superficial pleasure that comes from comfort and security, will come as a result of it. 

 I guess there will always be a part of me that, like Grandma, craves security and fights desperately to attain it.  It’s human nature.  Maybe one day I’ll have it within my grasp again and life will be boring.  But until then I have a story to finish.  It will be a story about pain and adversity, loss and uncertainty.  And I intend to finish it well, coming out on the other side whole and new, and thanking God for every moment.