St. Josephine

A memoir of my great grandmother. Won first place in a district-wide writing contest.

My great grandmother Josephine was an incredible woman. In life, she had little, but that which she owned she gave away with a freeness that could only be born through countless years of wisdom. Often I would sit with her in her small, charming bedroom, and she would offer me Hershey’s kisses as I listened to her many stories and anecdotes. She told me about religion, about charity, and about my heritage. Above all, she taught me the value of kindness to others. She was a small woman with a heart unbound by physical restrictions, who never forgot a compliment or a favor. In her, I found a constant friend, mentor, and conversationalist. To my family, she was a support beam, an oracle, a soothsayer; the one we all went to for advice, company or counsel. When she died, we were devastated.

             I was young at the time, and when my great grandmother was taken to a hospice for her bladder infection, I didn’t fully understand what it meant for her. The hospice is a place in which the only mission is to provide comfortability for death. It is where people afflicted with terminal illnesses go to die. If I had been as old as I am now, I might have been angry, frustrated with the inability of medicine to cure, to heal, as it purports to do, or at the least, to provide a sliver of hope for survival. I would have been infuriated by our lack of options, by the cruelty of chance, and by the complacency of the hospice staff in the face of constant decay. Instead, naïveté protected me, and ignorance kept a smile on my face as I sat during her less-sentient periods watching cartoons in the waiting room. Of that, I am ashamed, and regretful. If I had known it was the end, I would have tried to do more. I would have sat with her as much as I could and tried my best to comfort her as she had comforted me for so many years. If I had known she was dying, things would have been different; how could I have known? I hadn’t.

            Several weeks went by before my great grandmother finally passed. I could tell that the adults around me were relieved. Their faces bore the knowledge that her pain was over and that she had moved on to a better place; still, I did not understand. At times of grief I was shocked and at times of joyful reminiscence I felt out of place. How could she be gone? She had been there for my entire life; to me, a world did not exist in which she was absent. The chair in which she sat for Sunday dinner, unmoved and undisturbed from the end of dining room table, to me testified beyond deniability that she would come back to us. Perhaps she had gone on vacation; perhaps she had visited god, but surely, he had not claimed her. The bell for her had not yet tolled. For months I clung to my belief, expecting her to return.  She didn’t.

            Sometime after her death came the sorting through of her things. It is a dirty part of the natural cycle which we all will follow, but a necessary one. She never had much, but what she had was endlessly sentimental to us; everything that she kept had a story, and her books were the greatest treasure. She read voraciously and with each new novel her wisdom grew. Often she would quote passages from books or the Bible to me in our conversations. I would stare dumbly and try to comprehend, until she would smile and explain; how awed I was by her brilliance, unable to understand fully, yet still amazed. My grandparents keep most of her books now, though I keep a few of my favorites at close hand. They are a great comfort to me, and the knowledge within their bindings is boundless.

More valuable to me than the books, however, were the tiny and intricate ceramic figures which we had together pored over and analyzed. They were green with white bases, most of them being in the shape of people or animals from the Bible: Jesus, and Noah, and many of the animals which were loaded onto his ark were all present. They were petty things, trinkets, yet I would have traded any amount of money for them; they represented to me endless love and affection, a warmth and radiance in the passage of time that, having left the world, was not yet gone from it. I kept them and have them still. Often I imagine the animals frolicking about, and the joy it would have brought my great grandmother to see her figurines once more being cared for, kept safe and elegant. It is the least I can do for a woman who had done so much for me, when I could do nothing.

In misery or loneliness I often look at the figurines she left me. I pore my hands over the books that remain, and there is great comfort in them. The ceramic eyes twinkle and the words of the novel’s pages speak to me as she once did. Despite my lack of religious convictions, I like to think that she is there, in some capacity, still. My great grandmother was an incredible woman, and I will never forget her.

Author's Note

Be as harsh as you can. I am particularly interested in critique of pathos here.