I’m going to use this space to throw some thoughts around. My Grandma Alberts is nearly 92. She had a stroke early last year that just about did her in. Since then, it’s been a series of setbacks that have left her almost completely immobile and lacking the ability to communicate in any way that makes sense. She’s recently had another “episode” as they call it which has now left her unresponsive. It’s hard to say but it could be that only moments remain. Each way you look at this, it’s sad… even objectively. Subjectively, it’s worse. On the surface, it’s a life but I can’t help but become overwhelmed as my thoughts race further. It’s just how I am. I’ll sit at red lights and watch people… walking, in their cars, talking on phones. I think about how I don’t know them and have never seen them. Then I’ll think about all the people they are important to and how I probably don’t know them either. Hundreds, maybe thousands. This is one street corner, in one city, in a big country. It’s heartbreaking to think of all those eventual lost connections. And it’s certainly more heartbreaking to consider those lost connections when I am intertwined so tightly in them.

It’s hard to think about losing my Grandma. I can’t help but think of her as a teenager, living on a farm in rural Ohio. She worked hard because she had to. She watched her brothers move off, some to war, others for work. One all the way to California. Was that hard to see him move away and never return? He helped pay her way through nursing school. I would’ve missed him. She was tough, resilient. Maybe she didn’t think about her brother in California or the one in Boston. She had four kids to raise. She lost the oldest one 14 years ago. My Grandma understood a lot more than she let on but I know she never understood that. I heard her say it as his casket waited to be lowered into the ground. I wonder if she had regrets. When she was most proud. Or vulnerable.

––––––

And now I can ask none of those questions because she’s gone. Clarabel Eleyet Alberts died early this morning in a nursing home in Englewood, OH. She was 91. And while she might’ve reluctantly called herself many things… wife, mother, sister, aunt, nurse, volunteer, master of all things thread, etc etc… above all else, I believe, she was a teacher and her life was the instrument with which she taught. I will miss her and I will miss the generation she epitomized.