Confessions of a Closet Follower.

Hiya. Rachel has a blog, Steph has a blog, Jeremy has a blog.

I have a blog.

I am a follower.


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As for a topic today, I have tons to gush at the moment, but no proper vessel of humanity in which to pour it, so I'm just gonna write until I find myself spent of it and then I will quit writing. First of all, the issue of:

GRANDMOTHERS
I just lost my last one. She died on Sunday. She was THE grandma. She took me in when my parents decided that they needed some time for themselves. She made all my clothes, saw me through all the teenage rebellions (though mine were limited to being a vegetarian, hating God, and getting Bs on my tests), and loved me. Good heavens, she really, really loved me. I was unabashedly her favorite and she was mine.
My grandma was Jeanne Louise Quilliam Jaakola. She lived to the ripe and beautiful age of 91. She outlived a brother and a sister, a granddaughter, and almost my dad, too. Her last three years were plagued with Alzheimer's, but she never did leave us entirely with it. The last time we really spoke in person was around Christmas, and we had the same conversation three times in an hour. However, when your sweet grandma is smiling at you and telling you how very happy she is to see you, you don't mind hearing it a few times extra. I had her full attention for just a few minutes that day, and I was moved by some sort of premonition to tell her thank you. I've said it a gazillion times for passing the salt, buying diet Faygo instead of regular, sewing up the holes in my underwear...all the casual things for which you thank someone. That last time though, it was a soul-borne thank you. She never had to do anything like that for me. She didn't HAVE to be a mother at 70 years old, but she did. And I have never said thank you for it before. So, I did. And she got it.

"Anytime," she said.


Anytime.


So, when I got a call on Saturday morning saying I 'may want to think about driving up to Ishpeming because it looks like this is it', I put everything else aside, including the dread of running into the rest of that family (I am estranged from them, though that word is stupid) and drove to Ishpeming, with stern warnings that she maybe wouldn't recognize me, that I should be prepared for her to be comatose, etc. I knew, though, that Grandma would recognize me. With all the cruelties in the world, that's one I just wouldn't be made to suffer. That's just the worst thing that could happen.

I walked in and came face to face with the Demon Monster of my Estrangement (really...stupidest word for what it is, but there's none other close to it), hugged her briefly to belay any looming animosity, and turned to look at the tiny, shrunken, twisted little version of my gram in bed. She slept, and I didn't want to wake her, so I cried as quietly as I am capable and held her hands while I spoke to the DME about how fantastically HER children are doing, how they are free from liberalism, feminism, narcotics, alcohol, agnosticism, general life struggles and the burden of personality. I looked around to see all the pictures of said children and their children, all shiny, smiling, vacationing, and etc. How they are not featured in pictures of fathers with wheelchairs, stroke-victim speech impediments, poverty, and the like. I noticed the COUNTLESS pictures of those people, and the one small old picture of me in a giant collage frame with extended family and long-exhausted sunsets. The conversation in my head went like this:

"I'm her favorite, you know, and even though you've kept her from me, you can bet your ass that I'm the one she's most happy to see. A hundred pictures won't make her forget me, and you're the worst hypocritical Christian that's ever lived for thinking she'd forget me, you vicious, f**king c***."

I never said it, though. I talked about work and The Full Monty and my dogs. After all that was done, I figured we'd be heading into fight territory, and Gram was in and out, so I decided to go. Gram had this wretched bed sore from lying there, and when the CENA came in to move her around, she gasped an 'ouch' a couple of times, so I helped move her a little more gently, and then moved around the other side of her bed to say goodbye.

She woke right up. She was right there. And the DME couldn't do anything about it. My Gram knew I was there to say goodbye to her and nothing was going to stop that.

Jeanne Louise Quilliam Jaakola, after who's mother I am named, reached out her arms to me, smiled, and said, "Bridgette! Hello!" but her voice failed her, so her mouth said it. I hugged her and kissed her hands and fell right the fuck apart. All I could say was thank you. And all I could do was say it over and over and over again. She touched my face and I looked at her, and she winked. She winked and smiled and patted my hand. I took her face in my hands and kissed her on the cheek and we both whispered I love you. I stood there looking at her gorgeous old face until her eyes closed and she fell back asleep.

It was the most beautiful goodbye I have ever had. She died the next day.

I loved her so, so much.


Charity and I wore giant obnoxious hats to Grandma's funeral. Well, to the reception anyway. We dressed like proper ladies (thanks to Players de Noc) for the actual service, Charity in her Katherine Hepburn-inspired wool slacks and sweater and I in my actual 1940's era vintage funeral dress. We had proper smart caps for that part, pinned on and with hair coiffed appropriately beneath, and then we put on the flashiest things we could find; Charity in a pink feathered number and my head bedecked in mock blue and green feathers in an almost Russian Ushanka-style thing. Everyone that knew Gram knew why we were wearing those hats, and we had nods and smiles and thumbs up and she would have LOVED it. She would have rolled her eyes at us and said, "Girls, that is wildly inappropriate for a funeral in church. Bridgette Michelle, you should be ashamed."


And then she would have winked.



Issue #2
THICK YOOPER ACCENTS

Ross, my new gentleman friend, has lived outside of the U.P. for 28 years, yet still has a pea soup and cornstarch accent about him that I cannot ignore. Now, because I have great feelings of lust toward the fellow, I forgive it in him, but normally, I would have discounted his entire being for it. I've discovered, in fact, that I am far more forgiving of that accent in general of late, and in some cases, find it downright charming and hilarious.
My Uncle Al has this friend who goes my the name Iron Mike, and the first time I heard him speak, I thought he was foreign. When everyone laughed at something he'd said, though, I listened more closely and realized that he has the thickest, muddiest, beer-and-venision soaked dialect I have ever heard in my entire life. So thick is it, in fact, that it's FASCINATING. Allow me to translate one sentence:

Normal: "We were out at camp shooting deer with our twenty-twos and that son-of-a-bitch shot out of the woods and I thought we were going to die."

Mike: "We's was oot comp shoating deers wit oor twenny-t'hoos anat sunbutch shut oot da wuds annai taught we's was gwon diy."

Seriously. Read it out loud and you'll hear it.

It's marvelous. Maybe I'll allow myself a 'yous' now and then.


If I do, though, someone shoot me.