“Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one,” by Doctor Seuss. “Tomorrow might have been bad, but god has blessed you with a tomorrow,” my grandma would say. When I heard those things always tended to have a big impact on me. It always gave me the mindset that there’s always a positive in a negative situation. It did even after the tragedy occurred. My grandma was an amazing woman. She’s really tan, short, and always use to smell bad. I always use to think she never took a shower. She was around her 70’s but she’s one of the nicest people you’d ever meet. She was basically like a second mother to me, because she lived so close to me. I was constantly at her house. Almost every day I would walk down the street and visit.
The first thing I smell every time I walk into my grandma’s home is her perfume and food simmering away on the stove top. It’s a scent that I come to be familiar with over the years and it is something that I now connect to a feeling of safety and love. My grandma, Alba, is one of my rocks that I am able lean on when faced with troubling times. She is someone I am able to call on the phone to recount my day to her, seek advice, and just listen to all the different stories oh her when growing up in El Salvador. She is a person who I believe has such a huge influence on my life and taught me so many life lessons that I hold to this day.
My grandma and I were very, very close when I was growing up. She lived here in town so seeing her was something that my family did very often. Over this past summer I had gotten a moped. Almost every single day I would stop by and me and my grandma would just sit there and talk. We liked to talk about or crazy distant family members and just have a good time. It never got old talking to
You never truly know how much someone means to you until they are gone. All of the hot summer days spent at her house, the home cooked meals for lunch, the daily routine of watching game shows on GSN, the hours and hours of playing monopoly, and working the concession stand at Evans Park for the summer are now just cherished memories that I have with my grandma.
I remember my dad making our family go visit and warning us not to be shocked when we saw her. That she was undergoing chemotherapy and that had taken a toll on her body. I again, not knowing exactly what chemotherapy was just thought it was some type of medicine that was going to make her all better. Once we arrived though i got super excited and sprinted to the front door step. I rang the doorbell twice and squished my little face against the cold window to see if my grandma was coming to the door. That's when my heart dropped. She answered the door and she didn't look my grandma. She was wearing a blue jean dress, but it almost seemed like the blue jean dress was wearing her. She gave me a big hug, i was now able to wrap my arms around her entire fragile body. She also seemed a lot more exhausted than normal too, like she hadn't slept in a while, but what i noticed the most was that her use to be curled golden blonde hair was now buzzed short and dark
Initially, there were certain times when my grandma had taken care of me when I needed while I was sick. I used to run high fevers when I was a kid. There were times when I couldn’t wear anything but a t-shit with over a one hundred degree temperature. Hence, she cared about the importance of our family and put us before herself. According to my parents, she would stay up with me all night to make sure I was happy and safe so my parents could sleep. The amount of affection and perspective she had shown and given me makes me want to follow her footsteps.
My grandmother and I were never really close, but I miss her because I could have gotten close with her .I don’t really have memories with her.
She was kind and loving and treated everyone she saw as her own family. She passed away in 2006, it was sudden and unexpected and devastating to me. I still grieve her loss on a daily basis and have a huge void in my life. I try to fill this void with grandmotherly type figures. My husband’s grandmother reminds me so much of my gran and I just love her. I wish I could talk her into moving in with us, but I know she is too much Cajun for me to handle! I am the person I am today, because of my gran.
Of course you always hear people talking about how great their grandmother or grandfather are, I too feel the same way about my grandmother. I see her as more than my grandmother, she’s a role mole, my best friend and also like a sister when I need her. She’s always been a loving and caring person. Not for only her friends and family, but also strangers. People she has never met a day in her life she would be willing to go give her last too. You don’t find to many people like her too often.
Sometimes good things can come from a bad situation. Reminiscing on occasions that effected my life, some were so minor and some changed my life’s coarse completely. Childhood memories don’t always stick but the ones that do are worth everything. Writing letters to my father changed a lot about the kid I was and who I have become today; it taught me perseverance not to be ashamed and gave me the awareness to work on my writing.
We are all blessed with our grandparents. Some of us are lucky to spend a few hours, days, or weeks with them. I know I am definitely lucky to still have my grandmother around, however, she is not quite there. My baba (grandmother in Serbian) was the most independent and loving human being I have ever come across. She was constantly putting her children, grandchildren, and people she did not even know first. Baba was “the rock” of our family, keeping us all together, until she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. I will never forget the day I found her house a wreck. The situation really hit my family hard because the fun, loving baba we all knew would soon start to forget due to this awful disease and would later have to move in with us.
My grandmother has a very softhearted voice that I still hear telling me goodnight when we were little. She would wait with us until we fell deep asleep. And even as we got older she would gather us around the kitchen table and let us watch the old fashioned ice cream maker churn the best vanilla ice cream and then she would load it up with chocolate chips, and our parents would always say, "That's too many.", and grandmother just let us keep piling them on. My grandmother is the kind, gentle, loving, caring grandmother that I wish my children could experience today.
My great grandma was the my mother’s mother figure, since my mom is an irish twin her mother couldn't take care of her. So my mom was sent to live with my great grandma. My great grandma had thought of my mom as her own daughter and my mom loved her as her own mother. My great grandma had many grandchildren and loved them all, but she had always loved my mom the most.Ever since I was younger my great grandma would come and visit my family. When she would come she would shower my siblings and I with gifts. She always had gotten us exactly what we had wanted. She was the sweetest person to everyone around her. She would also get my cousins from my dad’s side gifts. She had treated them like her own children.
At the age of twelve, when my aunt died, my life was like an alarm clock. My aunt and I were fairly close. We used to walk around together often and talk about almost anything. At times I may have prefered her over my mother. She got me into my obsession of sports. She was there when I scored my first
up. We still have not had a proper ceremony so that we can put her ashes under the headstone. She died four years ago, but it took a long time for my mother’s family to decide what they wanted the headstone to look like and to pay for it. Funerals can be very costly. My grandmother was funny and caring. She always made us laugh. I could talk to her about anything. We were very close and she always had a smile on her face. I never was sad or cranky when I was with her. She could instantly make me laugh.
Something I believe that has been memorable in my life was losing my great grandma and remembering all the things she taught me. Almost all of my favorite child hood memories were with her. Aside from the fun and games though, she could be stern and hard on my brother and me. When I was younger, I didn’t understand it, but now, I realize that at the time in which she grew up her environment made her that way. My great grandma, grew up in the forties, times were hard money wise and obviously, that put some pressure on her parents.