Reason for the unannounced absence

I took a break from blogging this week while traveling to the promised land of Oklahoma to spend time with family after the death of my grandmother. My grandmother, Loreeta White, was 86 years old, and in her last few years she battled Alzheimer’s, then Parkinson’s, and finally uterine cancer. I am comforted that I know she is in heaven now, and that those wicked illnesses are not prevalent there. I’m taking a break from the normal drivel of this blog to tell you about my grandmother.

Loreeta Kessler married Harry Oscar Dickerson when she was 19. My grandfather had health ailments most of his life. He had scarlet fever as a child, which resulted in complete hearing loss in one ear and partial hearing loss in the other. An accident in a machine shop took the sight in one eye. He was a diabetic, resulting in the loss of one leg and his remaining eyesight, in 1966. My grandfather maintained a wonderful spirit and attitude through this; it’s not like he was a freeloader.

Grandma just gutted it out. Loreeta had a servant’s heart, and the work ethic that was prevalent of so many of those raised in the Depression. She worked in an assembly line in Oklahoma City, and was active in her church and was blessed to have a close knit family. She was a twin to Lorraine, and had a brother Claude and sister Vella Emma. Their vacations tended to be trips to see extended family that lived in California, Florida, Arkansas, wherever.

One of my memories of my grandmother is that in the car, she was always talking…about the weather, road signs, anything that was of interest, or even not, that was coming up. It made sense when my blind grandfather was in the car, but after he died in 1979, I didn’t think it made any sense. I was a stupid teenager and didn’t realize she had programmed herself to talk through these things to be my Grandfather’s eyes to the world, and that she couldn’t be reprogrammed.

After my Grandfather died, Grandma remarried a gentleman named John White a couple of years later. John and Loreeta were married two years before John had a massive stroke in a mall in OKC. He never regained consciousness, but my Grandma White faithfully went to his side at the nursing home daily for eight weeks, praying for his healing. That day never came, and he passed away. Grandma resigned herself at that time that she was solo, and poured herself into helping “the little old ladies” at her church, where she taught the ladies’ Sunday school class and sang in the choir. Grandma was 63 at the time. She continued serving others until Alzheimer’s made it unsafe to do, and many times was helping out, taking meals, and driving folks around that were younger than her.

My grandmother loved to garden and grew roses and tomatoes. She prided herself on mowing her own lawn, well past her 70th birthday.

The biggest lifelong lesson I learned from Grandma was forgiveness. She has a son who has not been a model son, more prodigal than model. I won’t belabor the various missteps nor the pain and inconvenience that his actions caused, but I do remember a conversation where someone asked her, “Why do you put up with this?” and her answer, paraphrased, was “Because he’s my son, and he’ll always be my son.” I’ll never forget that statement, as I thought it such a model of what we should do, but in such contradiction to what we execute on a day to day basis.

Grandma, thanks for the lesson, and for everything. Please tell Grandpa I said, “Hello.” We’ll see you later, and I look forward to that day.