Margaret

I told you about my grandpa Scottie, and now I want to share a little about Margaret, my maternal grandma.  Grandma Lynch, as we called her, was not your average grandma.  When I think about the fact that she was a P.E. teacher, I crack up.  She didn't look like a P.E. teacher to me...she was my grandma.  At times I have to laugh because I envision Coach Sue on Glee...although I know my grandma was really nothing like her...but I would've loved to have seen her in a sweatsuit.  She also taught English, which fit her style a little better, at least in my mind. 

I don't remember my Grandma Lynch being an exceptional cook, but she always had these iced oatmeal cookies in a cookie jar on her counter and I learned to love them.  I always got Cheerios (the real brand) and bananas for breakfast at her house.  And besides the oatmeal cookies and Cheerios, you could always count on there being Jello with fruit in it at supper time.  I have never seen two people eat so much Jello and fruit as my grandparents.  It's not that I don't like it, they just ate it a LOT.  Whenever mom or I would ask them what they needed from the grocery store (when they moved up here) they would say "Jello."  It would just crack us up.  There could be five boxes of Jello in their pantry, but they would always add it to their grocery list.

My grandma could knit just about anything and everything you could imagine.  I am sure I under-appreciated that when I was younger, and of course, wish I had paid a little more attention to it now.  I can knit, or at least I used to be able to, although a scarf would be about all I could handle, I'm sure, and that would be after some serious practice.  I loved messing around with her knitting needles and the skeins of yarn.  Her knitting bag went everywhere she did.

I was in my teens when my grandparents fully retired and moved to Texas.  First they would only go during the winter and then they gradually became full-fledged Texans.  I'm trying to remember, as I write this, how many times I went to Texas to see them and I can come up with three.  Seems like there was one more, but I'm not so sure.  It was a very long trip down there...23 hours in a car...so it wasn't something you could just pick up and do on short notice.  Jay and I drove it once with my cousin Mikki in tow...it was a long ride! 

Their house was in the Sunshine Country Club Estates in Harlingen, TX.  Their address was 9G Minnesota, if I'm not mistaken.  They had a golf course, swimming pool, tennis courts, shuffle board, a club house, etc.  It was everything they had wanted.  My grandma attended (and may have even led) some swimming aerobic classes there on site, she volunteered at the hospital and she taught English to Spanish-speaking children at a local school. 

My grandparents were both very active in their church and little community down in south Texas.  They took trips into Mexico and would come up to Illinois to visit their three daughters and their families.  They were healthy, active, had planned all their life (financially and otherwise) for their retirement and they were living their dream (I would guess).

One day after playing golf, my grandma walked in their house and fell to the floor.  She had a stroke right there in her living room in front of my grandpa.  Knowing how much they loved each other, I can only imagine how awful that was for my grandpa.  My grandma had suffered a stroke and thankfully had very little brain damage, she hadn't lost her ability to think, but she had lost her ability to move the right half of her body.  She was wheelchair-ridden from that point on.  It is amazing to think that one moment you can be playing golf and then next moment you are paralyzed.  I know there are worse things, but it has to be a heartbreaker, losing all you had prepared for basically in one single moment.   Unfortunately, things like that seem to happen all around us.

You know that there is always something good that comes out of the crummy stuff.  For me, my grandma having that stroke made me closer to her.  They ended up having a house built and moving to little ole Martinsville where they would be closer.  Like I said, my grandma's mind was okay, she was a little slower with some things, she had to work with her speech and she sure was quieter after that, but she was still here and still present, if you know what I mean. 

I grew much closer to both my grandparents over the few years they lived here...some of the memories weren't super great ones, but I treasure them nonetheless.  I grew to appreciate their lives more and the love they shared for one another.  After Grandma's stroke, they no longer shared a bedroom.  So each night they would depart and go to their separate bedrooms.  Every morning, they had the same routine, one would say to the other "Morning, Star." To which the other would respond, "Morning, Glory."  (I may not have that exactly right, but it was something similar.)  They no longer were afforded any privacy whatsoever, so that may have been one of their little codes, you know, other than just a simple, "I love you."

Eventually the burden of their care was just too much and both my grandparents went into the local nursing home.  They shared a room so they were still together, and they were together until the end.  My grandma passed away first and later Grandpa went on to join her.  I may not have been as close to them growing up because of geography, but I became close to them in the end and I'm so grateful, as awful as it may sound because of the circumstances, that they had to move up here....or I may not have shared those times with them.