On the Passing of my Grandmother

I announced on Facebook very early Sunday morning that my grandmother, Dorothy Hiler, passed away in her sleep at age 108 Thursday night. Many of you have offered your sympathies and condolences, and I appreciate your outpouring more than I can express.

But I have to remind all of you that I have been told this woman was going to die for, no joke, the last 20 years of my life. I've heard it every year since 1997, that "we're not going to have her for much longer." Well, not much longer turned out to be 20 years. So to say that where I am is anticlimactic is a gross understatement. I expected to be here a long, long, long time ago.

In those 20 years of "make sure you give extra special attention to your grandmother because she could go any minute", a whole lifetime of things has happened. I graduated graduate school, found my dream job, got married, got divorced, lost the dream job, realized I was never going to reproduce, and moved clear across the country to find the place where my brain works.

That's where I am with her passing.

Please remember: as of four years ago, she didn't recall who I was, really who any of us were. On a good day, if I stayed long enough, she'd refer to me as "Carolyn", and I suppose that was as good as I could hope for. My father could not handle his mother in this state and refused to visit her. So her passing is a bit of a relief valve in that regard. He's relieved, and my uncle is probably very conflicted about the whole thing...but that's his story, and he deserves to be the one to choose to tell it.

My grandmother was not warm and fuzzy. I know some people who think she was, but my definition of warm and fuzzy is my mother...and let's be honest, Santa Claus is not as warm and fuzzy as Carolyn. No, Dorothy was actually very much a self-made woman. She started social clubs--she LOVED social clubs--and she was very interested in the goings-on in her town, because that's where she lived and it was important to be a part of it. I've mentioned before that politics is a big deal in our family, and I believe she played an important role in that by simply wanting to know what was going on, civically, in the town around her.

We all knew that she was going to be around a long time, because the assumption generally is that you live 7 years longer than your same-sex parent (or that's what they said in the 70s when Dorothy's mother passed at 93). So we knew she'd likely be a centenarian. And she had her brain for a lot longer than anyone would have guessed. I can only pray I have mine for as long as she had hers.

We were not especially close. But you must understand that this side of my family does not know how to DO close. I'm learning more and more that it is my mother's mother's family, the Jerretts, the crazy people who take over Selkirk Shores once a year--they know how to do family. We Hilers didn't. And that is NOT to cast blame on anyone. If anything, Dorothy aspired to keep us all together by her very presence. And for the most part, it worked.

My father's extended family will be around on Tuesday. I don't know what that means, exactly, because as I said, for the most part we don't know how to do family very well. Everything in our lives with Dorothy has had a ceremonial aspect to it, and Tuesday will of course be all about ceremony--something my father wishes to eschew this time around and knows he cannot.

So again, I thank you all for your kindness. My concern this point is making sure my uncle doesn't collapse and that the stress of handling everything doesn't make Bill even more prickly. My job will be managing Mom during this time, and as my mother is my favorite person on the planet, I'm grateful for that.