Thoughts for Tuesday
11.24.2020
Now Rosey, he always said...
The holidays are always something that bring joy and sadness all-in-one for me. It is a time of year I love family, and a time of year I reflect on that last season. That last season I had my grandparents together for one...last...holiday.
My grandmother...
The Matriarch...
The quiet one...
The strong and soft one...
The one that faced adversity alone.
God has blessed my family with a heritage of strong-willed women.
It is this time of year I sit and think in the quiet, dark moments. I silently sit, and remember watching as an amazing woman of almost 80 years withered away from things that the doctor could not explain.
I think of all those precious moments. All those amazing little memories.
But my favorite, the one that I ardently miss...
I miss gramma's soft hands tracing my face.
Tracing my face over and over washing love and protection over me.
All the while she would sing to me.
Oh yes, my gramma, she...she was a singer. A true artist to the core. She was an amazing woman that was always on the edge, but refused to jump. I see it now thinking back these years without her. These holidays that she is not here to laugh and sing and play the piano. She had put herself in a cage, and never really mustered the courage to open the door or hand the key to someone on the outside looking in to open it for her.
She was chained from breaking truly, and passionately free to transform into the amazing woman I know was inside. My gramma loved her family and people, but was always longing to know what could have been.
There is the ugly truth of what society, humanity, and fear can do to you.
I was there.
Rosey's little Kimber.
I was sitting there on the edge, and I had to make a choice.
I had to make a choice without her.
I realized how many times I had ran to her for help never asking her if she needed it when she was no longer there to run to.
I finally found the beautiful in the ugly.
I found the hard, but amazing.
I learned to understand what a true cage was like gramma.
I could feel the cold.
I could barely see for the soul darkness.
But...
I found that place where gramma traced me into existence.
It all finally...for one brief second made sense to me in those cold, hard, alone moments.
I surpassed and did what a legacy should make one do.
She modeled what she would not, or could not live in her lifetime. Bound by propriety and a system that was patriarchal. She had traced the strength within over and over, washing me with matriarchal love and peace.
It is the season I fear.
The season in life.
The time of year.
A season of death and rebirth that always gets to me.
My gramma's last words were cutting, chilling really.
And now...
It dawns on me...
I finally get it!
My grandpa was always saying softly, now Rosey...
He was always trying to calm the tigress within with his loving words and acts of kindness. He was always trying to let her know she was enough, even though she never felt like she was enough.
And...
She finally spoke her mind to me 2 days before she passed. She finally let out all the emotion that she really wanted to let out come screaming out from the depths of her inner most being. Gramma finally told me what she knew I NEEDED to hear, not what I WANTED to hear. She was preparing me for all those moments the next few years after she past that I would be utterly, and humanly alone.
It's not that she was trying to tell me she never loved me. That sweet, kind-hearted woman was finally telling me, truthfully, about life and how to not be trapped by it.
Even now, as I write this short little remembrance of her I can feel those soft fingers tracing my face so gently...and they say peace child I knew you would find peace.