I spent part of the weekend in Columbia helping my mom on a project. While I was home, I made every effort to do a post, and to approve a few comments. Unfortunately, my parents’ computer, a low-end eMachines model, and a ridiculously slow dial-up connection with AOL made connecting with the internet a twenty-minute ordeal. And once I finally made it to the blog, it took forever for the login to work and the comments window to appear so that I could approve them.
I think I got most of them up, but by that time, I was pretty much done.
So I plundered around in my immediate surroundings, the room that used to be my room and has now become a sort of a “junk room.” It is full of material and fabrics my mom is planning to use one day (when she gets around to it) on some sewing or quilting project. There are also lots of old clothes that mom is in the process of sorting to give to relatives or local thrift stores and homeless shelters. And there are some of my old things in there as well, taking up space. We’re packrats, you see, and we always will be, despite our best efforts to not be.
One of the things I found fascinated me. It was an old checkbook. It contained a register and a few blank checks from a long-closed account at a bank that hasn’t existed (thanks to merger after merger) for ten years or more. But what fascinated me so much about this particular checkbook was that it belonged to my grandmother, the one who would have been 100 this past June, and who died 25 years ago this past March.
It had been a joint account shared by my mom (her daughter). My mom did most of the check-writing for this particular account, which wasn’t surprising because mom helped her mom with her money. But this clearly was a side account, because there weren’t that many checks written; the register started in 1975 and had entries through May of 1982, two months after my grandmother passed away. Some of the entries were written by my grandmother, and it was fascinating to see her handwriting, which wasn’t as neat as my mom’s and had that “older person’s” penmanship. Those of you who have seen your own grandparents’ handwriting and have noted oddities in the way certain letters are written, or who have seen historical documents from the turn of the century surely know what I mean.
What was particularly interesting to me was the timeline toward the end of the register.
My grandmother died of cervical cancer that had spread. By the fall of 1981, she had been feeling more and more run down, but wouldn’t go to a doctor. There were other symptoms that indicated something serious was going on, but she didn’t tell anyone about them for a few months. By the time she finally said something and was taken to a doctor by her concerned children, some time in late November or early December, the diagnosis was that she had stage five cancer, the worst stage in terms of chances of survival.
There was a check written to her doctor, whose name I hadn’t heard for many years, in early December. Then a check written to a nurse, and to a hospital. She started radiation treatments which were designed to shrink the tumor to allow for the possibility of surgery, even though the doctors probably knew it was far too late, around Christmas of 1981. She did about twenty treatments, and I think she did two or three per week as I recall — I was just 12 at the time — for several weeks.
The last entry she wrote was in early February, and it was written to the cable television company. Unlike other entries, which listed “CCTV,” for Columbia Cable Television as the payee, this one read simply, “TV” and was written in a more shaky, fragile writing than earlier entries.
Sometime in late December, a few nurses were hired to stay with her during the day. Entries indicating checks written to pay them continue through February. Then those stop.
There was an evening in mid February, 1982, when my grandmother was taking a nap in her room. My mom and my mom’s sister were in her kitchen, cooking a pot of butter peas and rice. (For those of you “Yankees,” butter peas are a lot like lima beans, but tend to be slightly more plump, slightly less “pasty” and have a little sweeter taste.) Butter peas and rice was one of my grandmother’s favorite dishes, which is a testament to her early years spent in a lower-income family that certainly wasn’t helped by the Great Depression.
While I was in the living room watching television, my uncle arrived and walked back to the bedroom to check on her. She came to the living room, seemed tired, and as she talked to him, she seemed to have trouble thinking of the right words to say. She wasn’t really slurring her words, but she seemed to stammer a bit at times. She said, at one point, that she couldn’t think of the right words. “You’re just tired,” I told her, and my uncle repeated the assurance. But that was the moment that I knew — for the first time — that she wasn’t going to survive; I had watched enough television shows to figure out that I was witnessing a stroke.
She was rushed to the hospital when that confusion didn’t get any better after a few minutes, and she had a second, more massive stroke that left her in a vegetative state. She died on March 1st.
It wasn’t the first time I had lost a family member to death, but her passing was the first of someone particularly close to me, and I felt that death a lot harder than I ever imagined possible. Twelve-year-olds rarely think about death, after all.
One of the final entries in the checkbook was written to the pastor that led her funeral. I still remember “The Old Rugged Cross” as one of the hymns played.
It’s funny how something as meaningless as an old checkbook register for an account that’s not worth the paper the checks are printed on can produce so many vivid memories. When I mentioned having found the checkbook, my mom said that she should probably throw some of that stuff away, but that she just hadn’t thrown away anything of hers.
I can understand that. I’m glad she’d kept that little checkbook all those years.
So I thought I’d offer a solution…for me and for those like me.
If you’ve ever seen an episode of TV’s Batman from the 1960’s, you’ll immediately recognize the image. Any time Batman or Robin found themselves in some physical altercation, true to comic book form, the screen would fill with an example of onomatopea when punches were thrown.
