Each year, I silently pay tribute to a dear woman I never knew on her birth date.
There is such sadness in the realization this woman, my paternal grandmother, would have been a key figure in our lives, if only fate had been more kind.
To love a grandmother and create core memories with her is a sweet and sparkling thing. I see and treasure it now in the reflections of my young grandchildren when they first spot me in a crowd. It is a bountiful gift that reaches both ways, and I receive it with gratitude.
My father found it painful to acknowledge who was missing in our lives, especially when we were very young. I realize, now that I have the perspective of time, that the loss was still fresh; he had been a tender 13-year-old on the day his mother, at age 35, died on March 22 in 1946 during a tonsillectomy. He was still quite young when my memory of him begins.
As her first-born, Helen and the boy she called Sonny had been very close, and they accomplished much together on the farm.
“Mom knew how to make even the hardest jobs fun, and there was plenty of both,” Dad often said.
Helen was the glue that held the family happily together. His sisters were 12 and 10, and his brother just 3 years old at the time of her death. Their father retreated from every facet of life, leaving my father to step in to the void where parents once stood.
Missing her was like a wound torn open anew as my father walked through the hallmark moments of a life.
“Each birthday, my graduation, my engagement, wedding, births of each baby … it was all touched with sadness that my mom wasn’t here to share it,” Dad told me as we talked later in his life.
He always acknowledged her birthday, though, and it came with a reminder to each one of us how much we should treasure our own mother. Because of this, each year I find a way to honor her on her birth date.
And so yesterday, it seems appropriate that I helped one of my sweet dogs in birthing a litter of puppies. Dad described his mother as the life behind the dog business that was a large part of their family story. Helen’s hand-written dog records which show that English shepherd pups were sold and shipped to all 48 states mean so much to me, and the day Dad gave them to me stands out in my most significant memories.
Life is filled with weighty occurrences, including the absence of what could have been.
