Arms full of flowers...

     It is early morning…and it is raining.  Once again, I am on my way to visit my grandmother's room in the hospital.  Early dawn in this place is eerily silent.  The corridor lights of the floor have not yet been lit.  I walk into the darkness, the soles of my shoes squeaking like the windshield wipers of the passing cars outside.  The morning's palest manifestation of light and shadow spills in through the cracks of the windows, casting melancholy in its wake.

    I enter her room hearing the empty sounds that I hear each day: the respirator keeping rhythm like a ragged timepiece in measured expirations that signify a pulse, but really call out to me the ebb of a heartbeat.  The suction of the nasogastric tube and the intravenous lines giving out occasional alarm bursts caution my hope. This breathing I hear is artificial.  An acrid smell hangs in the room and wondering for only a moment if it is against hospital rules, I open the windows.  The raindrops splatter the windowsill and my face, but the sound of the rain outside the room is somehow soothing.  As the fresh air pours into the room, I remember that if it weren't for the sadness that the mother of my father weren’t here, in this bed, dying, that it is springtime in my Florida home.

    In this bed lies an elderly comatose woman, her long gray hair tumbled across the pillow, the lines of her face tell the unconscious narrative of a life. 

Finally, I do not wonder who she was.  The expectant lift of her brow is gone now.  I can see the tiny blue lines in her skin.  She looks worn and tired, but the remnants of a former beauty still remain.  And with my twenty-something year old eyes, I realize that the beauty of her youth has really given way to a deeper kind.
 

    While she lived, she was so strong, always able and filled with endurance and courage that always came just when she needed it.  Her frailness now in this bed, frightens me.  Medicine offers nothing to help her now.  The stroke was massive.  I think how she would hate this.  No voice.  No control.  As I look at her in this unwanted sleep, I remember that I am an extension of her.  I am reminded of my own mortality.
 

    I begin to do the things the nursing staff does not do, things that would be important to her.  I wipe her face with a warm cloth.  I comb her hair that has become disheveled, taking care that I do not pull too hard and that it is away from her face.  I put lotion on her cheeks.  They are dry, but smooth for an aged woman.  I adjust her gown and fluff her pillow as much as I can without lifting her head, sometimes talking to her, wondering if she hears.  I try anyway.  I tell her things I always meant to tell her.  I tell her that I love her, trying to remember if I have lately.  And inside my head, angry at myself for not saying it every time I saw her.

    Her name was Joan Marie LeClaire Kennedy.  Once she was a beauty queen.  As a child, I had seen a picture of a young woman in a drop-waist dress, twenties style, with bobbed, slightly-waved hair.  She was pretty, smiling, with her arms full of flowers, and her eyes full of dreams.

    Born in Kankakee, Illinois, she went to Tampa, Florida with her contractor father, mother and sisters, May, Blanche and Mary Louise.  In 1928, she won the Miss Tampa Beauty Pageant.  Soon after, she caught the eye of then County Commissioner Harry P. Kennedy, the grandson of Thomas Pugh Kennedy who helped to found the city of Tampa.  Despite a an age difference and some raised eyebrows, she married him.  It was scandalous.  It was fabulous.

    Their marriage lasted more than twenty years when Harry had a heart attack and died leaving her alone with their three children.  The Depression had not passed over Harry.  His fortune had been wiped out.  Joan Marie was completely broke. 

   

     While she had always painted for her own pleasure, she found that she could actually sell some of her paintings.  Her seemingly innate business acumen helped in making some real estate transactions and soon she built a house next to the apartment building she and Harry owned along Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa.  Living there, she managed her small property.  It wasn't much, but it gave her the financial independence that enabled her to pay their debts.

    Joan Marie loved the city and being outdoors.  And as the years passed, her face became a familiar one in the downtown bustle of old Tampa.  She was growing older as the city did.  She loved to tell stories--all kinds--of growing up within the walls of a convent; of old Tampa and its characters; of the grandfather I had never known and of my father as a child.  She loved red hair, French history, Baroque and Impressionist art, antiques and mostly, with her artist's eye, all her "pretty children," which meant all of us, her l3 grand-children.  This was my grandmother.  This was where I came from.  And here she lay in a hospital bed as I stood next to her and tried with my mind's might to will her to stay here--with us.

    The rattle of the hospital breakfast cart is outside the door now.  The smell of hot biscuits drifts in through the door and it is time for me to go.  Once again, as every day she has been here, I kiss her forehead, hold her hand and say goodbye--just as though she hears.  It is the last time I will see her.  She died the following morning.

It was Mother’s Day and momentous for me in a thousand ways. I saw my father, the bravest, toughest man I knew, weep like a child. It was the first time.  I saw him in a new way, but with the all the tenderness a daughter carries for her father.  Now I realized in earnest how he was more than a father.  He was a son too.

    Joan Marie was my grandmother.  She had three children, thirteen grandchildren and was well-known by the people of our city.  She was an artist, a poet and a dreamer.  It is only now that I realize how she did a thing that is most difficult for any of us.  She made her own way.  To do that, she paid a price.  Perhaps she was whispered about as eccentric, "an artist's temperament," people might say.  But she knew all that and still, she still chose those things in that part of life she sought.  I was only a child then.  I didn't understand such a need.  There was much she showed by example that escaped my childish impatience.  That kind of individuality was too abstract a concept for my grasp then. But it was in those days before she died that any of what she tried to say finally broke through and I began to understand the way that she lived and all that it allowed.

    When she died, there were lots of things to be divided.  I got an antique lamp, a book of her poems and a painting that she did, but the best of what was hers had come to me in smaller, intimate ways throughout my life in her stories, her humor, her love of art, her reverence for beauty and in her resourcefulness.

  I find myself thinking of her often.  The memory is not painful now, but as the days pass and I reflect on our relationship it is bittersweet.  I wish I could tell her that it wasn't for nothing; that her efforts, her example, did not fail; that if I have somehow escaped the status quo in even small ways; that if things have been different or better, then I owe her a debt for her tender legacy.  And though she could not answer in those final days, I hope that somehow she knew...

I finally got it.