Down from heaven...

 

I never had a typical grandmother. My mother's mother passed away before I was born, and to this day I wish I'd known her. My father's mother was a spitfire who raised two children on her own after her husband died when the youngest was not yet three. She was a great lady, but she battled Multiple Sclerosis from my earliest memories, and she was in a nursing home by the time I was eight. She was never a typical grandmother - she stretched her culinary skills by making us cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. But she also always had plenty of butterscotch candies, and I remember many happy days spent in her home. She died when I was 25, and I still miss her.

I met my husband when I was nineteen, and we were friends for seventeen years before we fell in love and married. Pete's grandmother, "Mama", always welcomed her grandchildrens' friends as family, and we all called her Mama, were included in dinners where pasta fagioli and homemade ravioli and cookies and the best meatballs I've ever eaten were served in abundance. I worked her booth at St. Coleman's Italian Festival for years, where she was smart enough to put us Jews up front, selling, and the Italians in the back, cooking.

When Pete and I got engaged our relationship got closer. At that point she was in her late eighties, still living on her own, still driving, and still as sharp as ever. We'd play Rummikub, or cards, or just sit and visit as she told story after story of her youth, courtship, raising her family.

She loved her family, and it was a big one. When we added to it with the birth of Daniel she was ecstatic. She and Daniel had a special relationship, and she never tired of talking to him, talking about him, and playing with him.

As time passed and she entered her nineties her hearing and eyesight grew worse, but her sense of humor, love of the slot machines and memory endured. She moved in with her daughter, and we were lucky enough to have her for extended stays occasionally when Diane was out of town. She would sit with Daniel in his playroom and engage in Daniel's play, she'd let him sit on her lap and watch cartoons, she'd show him how to make her super-terrific meatballs.

 

We all loved her so.

And, we lost her on May 31st, as I've already told you. Peacefully, in her sleep, which is the best one can hope for. Today we had a memorial celebration and mass, and she'd have poo-pooed the fuss.

The world had her here for 97 years. I had her in my life for twenty-five, and Daniel is lucky enough to have plenty of memories of her, too.

And as he said to me, "Mama is looking down at us from heaven, and we're looking up from our hearts".