The Grandmother Story – part one

 

        I’m not a monster….I’M NOT!!!!  By now, so much has been said about me, and most of it behind my back because they foolishly believe I "can’t handle the truth".  I can handle TRUTH!  It’s the outrageous lies they are telling about me behind my back that I can’t handle.  My own grandchildren hate me, after I’ve been loving, patient, and supportive; both financially and emotionally; their entire lives!  I just cannot understand what their mother has done to them.  Why did she turn them against me?

        Though it is against my better judgement, no real names shall be used in this, the story of the supposed "golden years" of my life.  As of next month, I will be two years into my eighties.  This is supposed to be a happy time, is it not?  I always thought I would only have to fight the world while I was young, and then gracefully and graciously rest on my laurels, as they say, when I reached retirement age.  If anyone so young and naive is reading this, my advice would be to wake up and smell the roses!  It is NEVER so simple.  Nothing ever is.

        I guess to explain it well, I will have to start with the young years of my life.

        My father had only been married to my mother for exactly nine months (to the day!) the day I was born.  Mama was his second wife.  His first wife, who bore him twelve children, had died.  Mama told me once that the real reason she married Daddy was that she felt sorry for his children, having to grow up without a mother.  It’s funny, in a way.  I always thought love was the only real reason for marriage when I was a child.  During the early part of adulthood, I learned differently. 

        Being the eldest of the second line of children Daddy had was not an easy job, but I would not trade one single memory for all the money in the world.  I was the eldest of nine siblings.  My brothers and sisters, when they were still alive, would laughingly tell their children stories of their childhoods.  I was always the heavy, of course, but I always thought it very funny when my nieces and nephews would ask me if those stories were really true.  Yes, my dear family, they were true.  I loved my brothers and sisters as if they were my own children, for in a way they were.  Mama and Daddy depended on me to watch out for the "little ones".  I always took my job with total seriousness.  If there was trouble, I would be there to help. 

        It is painful to think back on the past sometimes.  Most of my sisters and brothers are dead now; even those younger than I.  My baby sister’s death, though, is the one that almost killed me.  Actually, there was a far more traumatic event in my life, which I will discuss in depth later in the story, which literally almost killed me.  Oh, how my heart aches every day when I see the photographs of my family members who are no longer with me.  I have two sisters remaining, out of the fourteen of us.  All my brothers are gone. As I have already stated, my baby sister is gone, and that is really more than I can handle right now.  I think my time is coming.  That is why I am writing this story.

        When we were growing up, all of us were taught quite early to love, honor, and respect our parents.  What they said was law, and if we broke the law, we feared they would kill us!  They never would have killed us, of course, but when one is a child, things that seem illogical to adults sometimes seem perfectly rational to the child.  Point being, we

knew to obey our parents, unlike children of the more modern generations. 

        I started working as soon as I was out of school.  Yes, I was one of the fortunate ones who got to graduate from school.  My parents demanded that of all their children, anyway.  They (and I) never understood all the other parents of their own generation who pulled their children out of school so they could help "work the crops" or tend the house, etc. 

        Pride never stood in the way with me.  My parents were able to purchase a home in 1929, and they had a limited time frame to pay it off for the good price they had gotten.  As I was only eight that year, I could not contribute to the payments on the house for a bit.  I graduated at age 13.  That was the way in European schools at the time.  So, in 1934, I started my life in the work-force.  I took different jobs here and there, but almost every penny I earned was a penny spent on the mortgage or the utility bills.  I managed to do some extra work "on the sly", and I was able to treat my siblings to a movie or a toy from time to time.  They never knew how I got the money, and all I would tell them was to hush and enjoy what they had while they had it.  How I loved pleasing them!  And how it hurts, so terribly, not to have them in my life anymore.

        At the age of 23, I became pregnant with my son.  For the sake of protecting the innocent, I will call my son Karl.  I never told Karl’s father that I was with child.  He was an American soldier, and his time had come to go back home, so I quietly let him move out of my life.  Though he was an American soldier, his family had emigrated from Germany, our home country, to the United States within his lifetime, which made him a German.  Therefore, Karl, my only child, was a full-fledged German. 

        After I gave birth, people I had believed were friends turned their backs on me.  They were not brave enough to tell me their thoughts to my face, so I heard the talk that went on behind my back.  Sometimes my back was not even turned.  They called my son a "little Ammie bastard".  My baby.  I knew, from that moment on, that his life was not going to be easy, and I had a dreadful feeling that it would never be happy, so I determined to fight for my boy with every ounce of my being.  If his life was hell, at least his Mama’s life would be hell, too.  Maybe that would not seem a consolation to him, but I refused to have my son suffer alone.  If I had to watch him suffer, it would be only at a VERY high price to me.  I could not allow people casually to insult, injure, and destroy my own flesh and blood.  Damn them all and everyone who would EVER try to bring my son down!!!!!  If no one else in the world would stand up for him, he would know beyond the shadow of any doubt that Mama would ALWAYS fight for her son!!!!  This part of the story is the most tragic of my lifetime.

        It has been difficult as hell to see so many loved ones pass away.  I dealt with my parents’ deaths as they happened, because we always expect them to die eventually, as awful as that is to say.  Then my older brothers started dying in the goddamned war.  And it didn’t matter to anyone but us that our brothers and my parents’ sons were dead!  What really hit me even harder was when my next-to-youngest sister, Johanna, died.  I did not even know she was ill.  She bravely kept it from my sister Emilie, my son Karl, and my husband and me, all of whom lived in the United States by this point.  Looking back, I feel so stupid for not knowing my precious "JoAnn" was sick.  I look back to pictures we took on one trip back home, and I see JoAnn slouching in her seat, looking exhausted.  At the time, I blamed it on stresses in her life.  It never occurred to any of us that she may be dying!  We were back home to say goodbye to my brother Friedrich.  We knew he was dying of cancer….maybe that is why JoAn

n kept HER cancer a secret from us. 

        Saying goodbye is the hardest thing in the world for me to do.  I hate it with a passion!  My grandson, Karl, Jr., calls me "The Queen of Denial".  I think I see a little bit where he is coming from with that.  Telling Friedrich that I loved him and that I had to go back to the US, KNOWING that I’d never see him again, was the hardest thing I had been through at that time.  Since then, more things have happened that have threatened my sanity and my physical well-being, as well.  Friedrich, Emilie, JoAnn, Ortrude, Elisabeth, Hans, and I parted with a great outpouring of tears.  My little brother, once so full of life, was dying, and he knew it.   And WE knew it.  What were we supposed to feel or do?!!!  Throughout that, I remained a faithful believer in God, as I had been brought up to be. 

        Not even two years later, Emilie received a telephone call in her home state of Indiana.  It was about JoAnn.  Whomever she spoke with told her that JoAnn was deathly ill and the doctors had taken her off the machines.  Emilie immediately called me, and we were shocked beyond belief.  We had had no earthly idea JoAnn was ON machines!!!  A few days later, as I was returning home from visiting my husband in the V. A. Hospital, I stopped in at my son’s house.  Karl and his family lived in the same town I did, so I saw them very often.  No sooner had I walked in the door than the telephone rang.  I knew what it was.  My sweet sister JoAnn, who wanted so badly to keep living, was gone.  We were told only then that cancer had killed her, as well.  Karl was particularly torn apart by this, as JoAnn had always been one of his two "favorite" aunts.  The other was Emilie.  I did not know what to feel.  I was sad, depressed, destroyed, torn apart, in a RAGE that this should happen to my poor, sweet sister.  She was not even sixty when she died. 

        After JoAnn’s passing, her daughter literally lost her mind.  Waltraud (Traudel) was very attached to her mother.  As my sister’s illness progressed, Traudel had spent her entire life savings and almost every cent she earned trying to find a cure for JoAnn.  She tried every medicine she heard of.  Eventually, she even bought holistic medicines, and JoAnn agreed to take them because she so desperately wanted to live.  At this point, I began to get angry with God.  I still believed, but I did not talk to Him as I should have, and I did not WANT to talk to Him or rely on Him any longer.  I felt that I was being forced to carry a burden too heavy for my heart to bear, and I could not understand why why WHY He had allowed such a gentle, caring person as JoAnn to suffer so much and ultimately DIE, when she wanted to live so much.  How could I talk to God now?  I still did, but not much, and not the same way. 

        One year and nine months after JoAnn’s death…..I almost cannot write about this…..

The absolute terror of what happened that December is really beyond my capabilities of explaining.  My son…the one I had vowed to fight for, love, and protect with everything I had inside me…he was taken from us.  My precious baby, whom I loved above any and all others.  I still have to tell myself every morning that he is no longer here.  I’ve always heard it said that the absolute worst emotional pain a person can endure is the death of a child.  Take my word for it, this is the truth.  I thought I had had to be strong in my lifetime.  I thought

that if I had made it through all that I had survived, I could take anything on!  Was I EVER wrong!!!!

        Karl drove a truck for a living.  He did not like his chosen profession, but he did it so he could support his family.  He had a beautiful wife and three angelic children whom HE loved above any and all others.  Karl possessed a steely determination of his own to be the best there was at anything he did.  He was an excellent driver, though sometimes I know he was too confident in his abilities for my own tastes.  When he was on the road, he seemed to believe he OWNED the road.  One day in December, someone proved him wrong.

        Looking back, I have to thank God every day for sparing my grandson’s life that day.  Jeff was supposed to have gone on that fateful trip with his father, but, as fate will have it sometimes, an asthma attack changed those plans.  Karl decided that Jeff should stay home, in case his health should worsen, as it had many times before.  Jeff’s mother, Rose, was expert at dealing with her son’s crises.  She knew what medicines to give and when, and she knew when it was time to take him to the doctor or the Emergency Room.  Karl was not intimidated by much that I know of, but it daunted him to think of traveling with a sick child.  He was afraid he would not act accordingly to what my grandson needed done, so he chose to leave him home with Rose.  That was the last decision my son made for his family, and perhaps the greatest he ever made.  THAT, I can be thankful for.  The rest of what happened still stuns me to this day.

        I received a telephone call from my granddaughter, Mae, on that cold, bitter day so near Christmas. So close to Mae’s and my birthdays, too. Mae spoke with a tightly controlled voice.  She asked that I drive over to her other grandmother’s house and bring her over to Karl’s house.  I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea how serious it would be.  I tried to pry whatever it was out of Mae, but she only repeated that I needed to bring Mrs. Franks over to their house.  Nervously, and with much anxiety and exasperation, I drove to the Franks residence, picked up Mrs. Franks, and went to Karl’s house.  On the way over, Mrs. Franks got on my nerves by saying, "I bet they have a surprise for us!"  I snapped at her that something TERRIBLE had happened, but I could never have guessed what they would tell me.  I thought about everything but what it was.  I was especially concerned about Jeff, because he had been having some difficult times lately due to his worsening asthma.  That made sense to me.  After all, why else would they want BOTH grandmothers there?  While Mrs. Franks rambled on in her annoying way about some mysterious Christmas surprise meant for the two of us, I tried to ignore her and figure out what was going on. 

        I THOUGHT I was prepared for whatever news they had to deliver to us.  Looking back, I cringe at the thought.  Had it been Jeff or Rose’s father or anyone else in the world, I probably would not have been nearly prepared to receive the news, but when I was told it was MY SON….how can I describe that feeling?!!!  My own son; gone.  I did not believe it.  I accused Mae of lying about it!  I called the police officers all kinds of names.  I screamed.  I cried.  I BEGGED God not to let it be true!  But it WAS true.  My son was dead.  He had been involved in a terrible accident, which left the truck he drove a crumpled mess of torn metal.  Jeff probably would have been in the sleeper, getting a good night’s sleep, when the wreck happened.  Had he been there and survived the impact somehow, he would have drowned in the sleeper.  The sleeper was completely filled with fluids from the truck.