Nana.

Yesterday would’ve been my great-grandmother’s 115th birthday. All day long, I was thinking to myself “Why does January 23 feel important to me? Is it someone’s birthday, or an anniversary of something?” This morning, it dawned on me. My great-grandmother (we called her Nana) was born January 23, 1906 in Ashland, Oregon. She passed away when I was 26 years old, in Seattle, Washington, so I was incredibly lucky to have actually had a large of time with her before she died, one week before her 90th birthday.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had grandparents and great-grandparents even, on both sides. Longevity runs in my family, that’s for sure. (As does young births. Everyone seemed to have children by age 20, as was the norm back in those days. I broke the mold on that one by never having a child.)

I moved into my maternal grandparents’ home at the age of 19 (almost 20), and lived there for four years while working at Boeing, and before moving to Germany at age 24. Nana also lived there. There were four of us in a house that was probably no more than 1200sf of livable space. (There was part of an unfinished basement where the laundry room was.) I lived in the entire livable portion of the downstairs and my queen-sized waterbed took up half of the one-room studio. I was mainly there to sleep and shower. Otherwise, I was upstairs with my grandparents, working, or out with a plethora of friends or boyfriends.

As Nana started to decline, we had to really “babysit” her. She sat in her mustard-colored fabric chair with lace doilies on the armrests almost all day. She would try to do things but was just getting more and more frail. I remember her “parked” in front of the television (which was an enormous piece of wood furniture with big, built-in speakers and television, and a shelf top, with knick-knacks) watching “Bambi” over and over. I think I knew every line and scene to that film, before we finally put Nana in a nursing home.

My grandmother never got over her guilt at having to put her mother into a home, because she could no longer care for her. She also never got over being raised a single child by a single mom, because her father was an alcoholic philanderer and left them for prostitutes and drink.

I’ve thought about my grandmother and Nana both a lot in recently days and months. I believe they are watching over me, helping to guide me, just as they did in life. If it wasn’t apparent from this post, they both made an enormous impact on my life, and miss them dearly.