My grandmother died last Friday. I can’t say that we were close. It’s been several years since I’ve visited that side of the family. From what I’m told, the personality I knew had slipped away a while ago, and she lately required a lot of care for a body whose mind wasn’t there. This last stage of passing sounds honestly like a positive thing for everyone involved.
I’ve been looking through the pictures I have of her and her family, most collected (in embarrassingly poor quality) for a slideshow created for her and my grandfather’s 50th wedding anniversary. The most recent, post slideshow, is from around 2006. In the span of a few moments, the snapshots transform her from child to newlywed to elderly woman. I only experienced the latter part of this person, and have a hard time imagining what the earlier parts would have been like. Generations speak across wide chasms of world views, the human condition colored by vastly different assumptions as to what is obvious and relevant. And eventually, there are only fragments, and those younger fill in the gaps with both the familiar and the foreign, painting a picture that those who experienced it might not even recognize.
It is a very beautiful photo. And I know what you mean when you say that the end is more like a release than anything else. I have had several people pass away in my family from lingering diseases, and you can only hope that death at least brings some peace.
And its quite right, you don’t really know what the other generation has lived through or experienced, unless they tell you. I guess I should visit my Aunt Grace again.
The basic facts and daily anecdotes they can tell you, and that’s quite interesting and worthwhile from someone who likes to tell stories, but there is much that is difficult if not impossible to convey. Everyone knows where they were when they heard that Kennedy was shot, or Pearl Harbor was bombed, but how did that change the national consciousness, before and after? Things that look ridiculous now, the prohibition, hiding under desks in case of nuclear bombs, made some kind of sense in the narrative of the time.
And the whole thing about the “good old days” which illustrates how foreign the present is for the people who invoke that phrase. I expect emotional intimacy from my partner. I expect equal rights across gender and sexual orientation. My grandfather (not the one pictured) expected me to be seen and not heard. His being alive during my lifetime doesn’t mean that he saw the same events in the way that I did, or in general the people in my generation.
I see what you mean. As far as the national consciousness and what not, that is pretty hard for individuals living at the time to think about. I mean, asking a person to think about their own actions ends up being hard enough. I do think that it is of interest though, and I think that often you can find good references and good books that address the questions that you pose.
And you are right, that at times, the silly things we see in the past are definitely easier to understand if you comprehend the time in which they occur. I think that’s often true for personal history as well as the world at large.
Its one of the great shames of human existence, is that its terribly hard to get inside the head of another person and see the world through their eyes.