Foothills of Childhood - Part 5

Part 5

My disabled grandmother was Granny Simon.  She lived upstairs in an old house the family kept for her --- alone.  For awhile, Fritz and Bernie kept a room upstairs for them also, while Granny lived in one bedroom quite alone in the bed unable to leave it.  

Once in awhile under some unknown unbelievable will, she would pull her paralyzed body out of the quilts and get beyond the door to the stairwell leading to the downstairs...where the bathroom was.  I can only surmise she was stopped before a horrid end could come of her cascading the entire flight.

There was a large picture facing her bed, of a long-dead couple who stared at her hypnotically from a past century.  They were her own grandparents, fore-boding, menacing.  

The chore of taking food to Granny was sometimes mine when I visited Uncle Fritz and Aunt Bernie, even though I was too young to understand the motive behind my necessity in this scene.  Emotionally, I was almost flat in this, my way of not screaming in terror or crying in shear fear.  Granny made me incredibly sad.  She couldn't speak, but would try, and then she would cry, tears...at me...a little girl too young to even go to school yet.  

I could not understand her situation, but the picture of her torment reached me clearly.  I handed her the food, and she always reached softly for me.  Maybe she thought I was my older cousin Jane going through childhood again, Granny's favored adopted child.  Everyone spoke of Granny as being a saint with a stern hand.  If they really thought so, why did they exile her and leave her only to me at these times?  or to occasional 'check-ins' from the shack next door?  

Jane had been her favorite child, whom she had somewhat adopted beyond her own ten children.  So maybe she saw Jane when she tried to hug me without words and cried at me.   Anyway, after all these years, I still do not forgive myself the inability to reach back and hug back and utter any kindness besides my dumbstruck remote caution.  She died in a rest home on my tenth birthday, but my guilt for not being able to respond softly to her at that time did not.  and no, I never cried.