Abi: A beautiful Pearl. [02/30]

My Nana Pearl was homemade buttermilk biscuits, bingo ink stains, and mid-day television soaps. She was, when I was in grade school, a constant in my life.
She lived fairly close and I remember spending plenty of time at her house in Haines City. (I’m actually wondering right now how we spent so much time with her, my sister and I, without mum and dad around. I wonder what they were doing… I’ll ask my mum someday.)
I remember her handwriting, hardly legible from what I think was Parkinson's disease. I remember her accent, her voice, but it’s fading a little.

In my mind my Nana Pearl was this delicate and pretty maternal figure. I cannot actually recall her raising her voice at us (though I am sure she did) and I can’t remember her being cross.
I remember how she shook a little at the hands, and how she always had her white hair short and permed, and the smell, and of course the old-lady pink lipstick.
I remember her off-white Oldsmobile that she had.

It’s really a lot of bits and pieces of the old house where she lived before she had her stroke. I looked the house up on Google maps early today, and it showed up as an abandoned house, without the love it once had… and the playful children (my sister and I) running about it, and down in the back yard. (Which I recall how much a drop there was from the kitchen window to the edge of the property.)
I remember once there was an empty hen coup on the border of the orange grove that the property sits against.

The image from Google Maps.

Ah, but the memory that lingers with me is years later when I’m crying in my aunt’s bathroom after the Nana Pearl I knew had left me.
I’m dead certain that is one of the reasons I never wanted to go to the funeral when she did pass, because I’d already mourned the passing of her years before and there was no reason to dig it up again.

My Nana had ended up having a stroke, I actually believe there was a few towards the end.
The first one hadn’t been so bad, and Nana had ended up staying with my Aunt Grace in their large house (with built in office) in the more central part of Haines City. She was doing okay then, she was still my Nana who I spent time with and enjoyed, but she just wasn’t allowed to do some of the things she had before (well, it’s not that she wasn’t allow, but that Grace didn’t quite want her doing it), like baking.
Nana made the best cheesecake from scratch.

Later on, though, something had happened. I don’t remember when or how, but I know that when Aunt Grace, Uncle Judd, and my Nana had moved out of town and into a house in a remote (and rather lovely nature surrounded) location that it was different.
Nana was gone.
At her birthday party one year I remember her asking where Jerome was. This was confusing to me, but then I remember it being explained that Jerome was my dad’s bother, who’d died in infancy (or at least fairly early) which had to have been back in the 40s or 50s (some 40 or more years before).This scared me in such a way I feel my chest aching as I think of it. What kind of world must she be in to have asked this? How did she forget? Where did she think she was?
What year was she living in?
This, to me, is one of my greatest fear—ever. The fear of my mind functioning against me.

Nana Pearl at said birthday party.

I remember on one occasion she kept calling me Deborah. Debbie was a cousin, but an older cousin who had children at the time (I was in my preteen years) and had to be close to 20 years my senior. I didn’t think I looked like her… but that’s not what crushed me so much.

I’d been forgotten.
All those years were gone.

And I looked at her, and it just… it wasn’t my Nana.

I cried, and cried, and still today thinking of it, I cry.
I hope that my girls, or grandchildren, or anyone I hold dear never has to look me in the eyes and realize I had forgotten them.
To me, that day in the bathroom crying my eyes out was worse than the day I heard she’d died.


I miss her.