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The oldest, and most telegraphed of the three passings this year was my Grandma’s.  We’ve known for about a year or two that she was suffering from cancer, and her condition had notibly deterorated from about spring onward.

Grandma was adventerous, often worried about us kids, and religious.  We had been making the most of her time left, planning a slew of family reunions and bringing in relatives from California and Hawaii, but only my younger sister saw Grandma in her final bed ridden days.  Still, she had copious amounts of cheer.  A devout Christian Scientist she accepted and wasn’t afraid.

She passed away at the end of summer, with her two sisters by her side.

At her house in California, we held a non-traditional funeral with music and food stations spread throughout the pool deck area and the living room, per her request.  It was like a get together, and a surprising amount of people came, invalidating my theory that the older you get the more you lose contact with people.  Some people came to honor my Grandpa, who passed away when I was a kid.

Grandma’s death fell upon me numbingly.  During one point in her life, she moved to Clarendon Hills to try to connect with us grandkids, but it was largely a failed attempt.  The generation gap was just too large, and although I now appreciate her attempts to culture us, at the time it was just a bother.

We thought she was a bit too uptight, along with the rest of our religious relatives.  While preparing for the funeral, my extended family further treated us like children, which only served to divorce me from any pain of her passing.  Jon felt the same way, but spoke the truth when he said, “At the very least, she’s responsible for our being.  We owe her for that.”

This left my dad as the de facto head of the Kimball family now, as the oldest male.  Living in Chicago, he wasn’t able to be with her at the end, and he spent his time working on the CB360T engine in the garage.  When he got the call that Grandma had passed, he was cleaning out carburetors.

Grandma’s death illustrated to me a lesson in aging and respecting the elderly.  At the get together, the slideshow showed she was a beauty queen as a young adult.  The remarkable American beauty was nothing like church going senior citizen I knew.  It’s sometimes hard to believe that every geriatric walker using pensioner was once a rebelious 20 something with dreams and a probable disrespect for authority.

I just wish I got to know that side of her better.