Nanny

             You could usually find my Nanny at her kitchen table drinking instant made coffee (light and sweet) or at the local A&P grocery store to get scratch offs and pick lotto numbers for the 11pm drawing. She loved watching soap operas on TV and reading tacky romance novels. By habit she’d wipe her lipstick from the corners of her mouth.  When you hugged her the musky scent of Wind Song and cigarettes filled your nose. Usually you’d find the smell of cigarettes unpleasant, but for me the smell brought comfort.
              For as long as I can recall my Nanny fought lung and breast cancer. She had been through so many surgeries I was almost certain she was indestructible and could live forever. When I was younger my mother was a hairdresser and I remember watching her stand in my Nanny’s bathroom styling her wigs. Many of my cousins will tell you about finding her late at night, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, playing Nintendo. In her kitchen would always be a bowl of gumdrops and her cat, KC, sleeping by the sliding glass door.                        

                Every card and every phone called was signed off with, “Love you 60 million.” I eventually got this as a tattoo after her passing. The backyard of her home was comparable to that of the one described in the book The Secret Garden. I loved exploring it and at night catching lighting bugs. We even had our own jingle that we made up, “Twinkle Twinkle little Nanny don’t forget to wipe your fanny!” I would stand outside her bathroom door singing it as she laughed from the other side. She would knit my Barbies sweaters and send them in the mail. One year she sewed me a Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz costume for Halloween (my brother was a Hershey Kiss) and when I first learned to rollerblade she made me a skating dress with a silver, sequin ‘H’ on the front.
             Everyone loved her. She attended Mass every Sunday she could and wore pins of saints on the pocket of her pajamas. She raised 2 of her brothers, 5 kids of her own, and eventually two of my cousins. She never complained once. Nanny rarely talked about her cancer. She always sure to not be seen without her wig or teeth.

        When I last saw my Nanny she was in Hospice. My mother would drive across Florida every weekend to visit her. I sent her the baby blanket she had given me as an infant to comfort her. She was very amnesic towards the end. During our last visit she at times did not recognize my brother or father, but enthusiastically opened her arms when she saw me. My mother spoon fed her clam chowder and I watched as she wiped the dribble off her chin. She had a hard time drinking out of a straw. I tried to imagine what it must be like to one day living life a normal human being to regressing into an almost infantile state. I tried to imagine what it was like to have a complete strange changing your diapers as an adult.  There was no dignity in this. It was not what she deserved being the person she was. It to this day infuriates me.

When leaving I went back to her room again to give her another hug because something told me that this would be the last time I would she her. A month later while in the dining hall of my new school my father called to tell me she had passed. I didn’t cry because I was comforted by the fact she would no longer have to deal with the burden of having cancer and being in pain. There would be no more wigs, no more chemo and no more surgeries. There would be no more pain pills and calling late at night slurring her words because she had taken more than prescribed to anesthetize her pain.

I feel guilty. I feel like I didn’t talk to her enough, thank her enough, or see her enough. I feel guilty I didn’t cry at her funeral. I think I was too angry at the fact that the funeral was not enough. Out of my entire family my aunt and two cousins where the only ones able to afford plane tickets to fly down from Connecticut. She needed to be at Saint Catherine’s where the entire church would be filled. There would be people who would have to stand. Where all the people who loved her would be there. Not in some small chapel with a crying child, only 20 people, and poorly singing priest. The priest was terrible. I hope one day I’ll be able to take her ashes to St. Catherine’s and give her what she actually dissevered.

I will always remember my Nanny as described above and hope that I can be at least half the woman she was.