tangledupinblue

We buried my grandmother this morning in her family crypt. She passed early Friday morning after what seemed like the longest of illnesses.

I'm glad it stopped raining overnight.




I loved her a lot.

I have her memories now, which I couldn't really see clearly while she was sick.

Every time I thought of her walking with me through Paris when I was six trying to find all the balloons from The Red Balloon, I found myself faced with the different woman who ws trapped in the bed before me.

It almost seemed obscene to think of happy times when she was active, to talk to her about them, like I was mocking her with things she'd never do again.

It was hard to reconcile her condition with the woman who captained her own boat, the Argo, in Bermuda for those many sweet summers, who waded into a lake in Southampton to free the rowboat my sister and I had managed to maroon among the life-threatening lillypads.

I hardly ever thought of her career as she lay sick for a decade, -- the first woman to serve as chief resident at Bellevue Hospital. She worked on the project that won the 1956 Nobel Prize -- helping to develop the cardiac catheter -- a device that recently helped save my father's life, and which helps millions of open-heart surgery patients around the world survive their troubles.

I'd forget how much you did for medecine, and particularly women in medicine because I couldn't see further than the care I needed to give you in those last years.

Now, the small consolation of being able to remember all that is what I took home from Calvary.

I guess it's not much, and at the same time, it's quite a lot, and will no doubt mean more to me as the days and years go by as I process more and more, and let more of the first you back into my mind.

I don't know what else to say though other than you rocked and I'll miss you.


~~~~~~~~~~~~`

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