Memories of My Grandmother: the later years.

Memories of My Grandmother: the later years.                                             

              Minnie (Wilhelmina) Elizabeth Kintz Rainey was my grandmother, born March 6, 1904, died March 12, 2003.  Her name had always been Minnie, until she applied for a passport at age 77 and had to get a birth certificate.  That was the first she found out that her given name was Wilhelmina.  She said her mother always told her she was named after her uncle Wilhelm, but until that moment she could never figure out what Wilhelm had to do with Minnie.  Now she knew.  She hated the name Minnie, mostly because of Minnie Mouse, but she hated the name Wilhelmina even more!

              In 1998, when my mother was dying of lung cancer, my grandmother still lived in the row house on Lawrence St.  She had lived there for 40 years, and lived there alone since my grandfather died in 1985.  There were 15 steps up from the sidewalk to the front door, 15 more steps to the second floor, and 15 steps down to the basement and the back door.  The washer and dryer were in the basement and there was a toilet down there.  The only other bathroom was on the second floor, none on the first.  So at 94, with her bad back, she was still doing her laundry in the basement and hauling the laundry basket up to the second floor.  She decided she wanted to sell the house and move into a nursing home.

              I had lived in Delaware since 1980.  My mother moved down in 1983, when she returned from five years in Germany.  As my grandmother grew older, she relied more on several friends and mostly on Jerry and Mary Mulderig (Jerry was her sister Marie’s son), since my mother and I were so far away.  So I asked her, if she was going to move to a nursing home, to consider moving to one in southern Delaware, where I could be closer to her and do whatever needed to be done.  So she came down that summer, when my daughters and I were living with my mother, taking care of her, and I gave her the tour of the local nursing homes (since I had been in private practice in the area and had had my father in several of the homes, I knew them only too well.  I also knew she wasn’t going to like any of them).  As we came out of one of them, Mom (which is what I usually called her) looked at me and said “I’ve been watching you with Eleanor (my mother).  I think when Eleanor’s gone I’ll just move in with you”.

              OOF!  I wasn’t sure I was going to like that.  My grandmother had been the main reason I left home when I was 21, and I wasn’t sure we would get along now.  But I would give it a try if that’s what she wanted.  After all, when my father walked out 10 days after I was born, my grandmother took my mother and I in.  I had lived with her till I was 21, my senior year in college.  Time to pay back.  

              My mother died Sunday, November 1, 1998.   On Friday, November 6^th, the day before my mother’s funeral, the girls and I drove up to Philly to bring Mom down.  We couldn’t go back to my house, a large, cold, drafty Victorian, with lots of steps, so I thought we would stay at my mother’s for now: a small prefab Nanticoke home.  There were 3 bedrooms, but one was like an overgrown closet, which the 2 girls, now 7 and 11, slept in.  The house was in a little one-street town called Cannon, with a Bridgeville address.  My grandmother got out of the car in the driveway and did a 360, taking in the corn field across the street, the houses on either side, the field in back and exclaimed “Ninety Four years in Philadelphia and it’s come to this!”  Diane, the 11 year old, looked at her and said “You live in the country now, Mommom.  You’ll have to learn to drive!”  Fortunately, Mom didn’t agree with her.  

              It was the darkness that got her.  She had always lived in the city; she was used to street lights.  She hated the night in the country!  By December we were all too aware that the house was too small for the four of us.  Mom needed some space away from the kids and they also needed some space of their own.  I found a great 4 bedroom one-story house in Seaford, with plenty of room for all of us.  When we walked through, prior to moving in, my grandmother walked into the front bedroom, and declared “This is mine!  There’s a gas station across the street and that light will be on all night!”

              Mom paid a man to pack up her house in Philadelphia, after we had gone up and marked what went.  He asked about the storage closet in the basement, and we said all of that went.  He asked if it would be OK to use the toilet paper rolls to brace things like the lamps in their large boxes and Mom said that was fine.  She was one of those people who, when a bad storm is coming, runs out for bread, milk and toilet paper, the three things you must never be without.  And, since she didn’t drive and couldn’t get large loads when grocery shopping, she just always picked up a roll of toilet paper (Scott’s – the single, paper wrapped rolls) on every grocery trip.  We unpacked roll after roll from every box.  With four people in the house, I didn’t buy another roll of TP for a year and a half!

              In the Seaford house, Mommom started to be more active.  She walked with a cane but said she could do the dishes, she just needed to lean on the sink.  Then she pointed out that the washer and dryer were right off the kitchen, so she could do the laundry if I’d just show here how to use them.  After she was doing that regularly, she said she could vacuum the wall to wall carpet if I would just get her a self propelled vacuum cleaner.  Who was I to argue?  After she’d been with us a couple of months, her friend, Rose, called and asked if she was happy.  “Rose always wants to know if I’m happy” she said.

              “Well, are you?”

              Mom laughed.  “I haven’t been so useful in years!” and for Mom, that was happiness!

              She tried cooking just once though, and burned the pork chops, at which she threw up her hands and said “That’s it.  I can no longer cook.  You have to do that.”  So she cleaned, I cooked, worked for me.  Not so well for her though.  Mommom was strictly a meat, potatoes and veggie cook.  When I was 9 and she was in the hospital overnight for surgery, my grandfather made dinner, and there were o potatoes.  That was the first time I’d ever seen a meal without potatoes, except for the rare occasions we had spaghetti.  He told me succotash was the starch; I didn’t need potatoes too, but Mommom would have had them.  So, at the age of 94, Mom had her first pizza, chili, lasagna, Chinese food, curry, taco, hot pocket, all the standards of a single working mother with two kids.  She was very good about it.  She would fill her plate, start at one side and eat to the other, no matter what was on it.  However, every time she walked into the dining room and saw the little containers of Chinese food, her shoulders would fall. 

              The first time I lived with her, ages 0 to 21, I never realized how funny she was.  She and my mother didn’t get along very well, and I always took my mother’s side.  Now, with just the two of us, I could appreciate her sense of humor.

              Mom was a news addict.  She and Pop usually went to bed after the 11 o’clock news in Philly, until the Iran hostage crisis, when Nightline started to broadcast.  Then she couldn’t go to bed till after nightline.  The big news in Delaware when she first came to live with us was the Tom Capano trial.  He was an attorney who was accused of murdering his mistress and dumping her in the ocean in an ice chest.  Mom watched the trial day after day (when I was in Kindergarten, I remember coming home to her watching the McCarthy hearings!).  One evening, Capano’s face came on the new and my 94 year old grandmother said “Look at him.  He has mistresses coming out of the woodwork and he’s not even good looking!  He must be really good in bed.  That thing must be made of diamonds or something!

              When you are a single parent, dinner table conversation revolves around kid things.  It was a revelation for my children to be expected to sit at the dinner table during adult conversation: politics in particular.  My grandmother was a cradle to the grave Democrat, who thought the sun rose and set in Bill Clinton.  If Hilary said all the Monica Lewinsky stuff was just a right wing plot to discredit her husband, then that’s what it was.  Since the children were going to a Baptist school at that time, I finally had to take them aside a say that there were other points of view other than Mommom’s.

              Mom was deeply religious.  She spent most of her time praying the rosary for the people she loved.  She would watch EWTN, the Catholic station, during the day: the mass, the rosary, the chaplet of mercy, whatever life of a saint was dramatized (but not Mother Angelica; she couldn’t stand her).  Then after all that, she would switch to Montel.  By the time I got home she would be ranting about those women, and how could they get up and say those things, admit doing those things!  I took her to church on Saturday or Sunday.  I kept forgetting how short the RC service is.  She was always done before we got back, standing outside holding the railing, in her green pants suit with her white hair.  Nerissa called her a string bean with a cotton top!

              I would also come home to find her wrestling with my eight year old younger daughter.  She would have her pinned to the ground with her cane!

              Mom was sharp as a tack until she broke her hip.  6 days before her 96^th birthday she decided to turn her double bed mattress.  Instead, it turned her.  After the surgery she was confused.  We brought her home on a hospital bed hoping that being in a familiar setting would resolve the confusion.  It didn’t.  She screamed when she was touched or turned.  After six weeks, she had developed a small bed sore.  I knew that if I hadn’t been able to prevent the sore, I would never be able to get it to heal.  So I arranged for her to go to the nursing care section of the Methodist Manor House, the best of the local nursing homes.  There they gave her oxycontin for her pain and were able to get her out of bed.  Her pain was controlled but she remained pleasantly confused.  She told me that her nephew, Bunny, came and danced for her.  She didn’t realize he was such a good dancer (Bunny had died about 10 years earlier).  She thought Oprah and her friends lived upstairs.

              One night I came to see her and she was at a church service, holding her neighbor’s hand and singing a hymn.  When she saw me go by the window, she started to fuss, so the nurses brought her out to me.  Mom said “We have to hurry.  Father Donohue’s upstairs with Rosemary and Anna Mae (nieces).  There’s going to be a mass.”

              I told her that I thought she misunderstood, that they had said there was going to be a church service, and that was where she had been.  I told her it was a Methodist church service and she said “Well, I don’t think that’s very nice!”

              Mom had fallen at the end of February.  In December, just before Christmas, I went to see her and she said “I’ve been thinking”.  She could tell me about my mother’s death and moving to my mother’s house and going back to sell her house and moving to Seaford, everything up until the time she broke her hip.  So I told her that I was taking the girls on a ski vacation, and when we came back, if she was still mentally clear, I would ask them to try physical therapy again.  She didn’t have to walk to come home, but she did need to be able to transfer from bed to chair and commode.  It took her until May, but she did come home again, clear as a bell.  She has missed 9/11 though, and watching the news one night said “What happened?  Everyone likes Bush.  When did they start liking Bush?”  She was a cradle to the grave Democrat and never did really understand what had happened while she was out of it.

              On her 99^th birthday, Mom ate her birthday meal: fried fish, fried potatoes, and string beans.  She blew out the candles on her cake and said “I don’t feel like cake right now.  I have a piece later.”  I should have realized then.  Mom had never not felt like cake. The next day she had a cough and fever.  She was a bit short of breath.  I told her I thought she had pneumonia and could go to the hospital and get antibiotics and get over it.  She said she didn’t want to go to the hospital.  I said she could take antibiotics at home, but she said she didn’t want to do that either.  She said “Just make sure I have a cup of coffee when I want it.”  For years, since Pop died, she had been praying to be taken too.  She would accuse the Lord of forgetting her, because everyone else was gone.  To which I would always respond “So who am I?  Chopped liver?”  But she did not want to get better this time.  She died five days later, with Nerissa holding one hand and me holding the other.