relentless

I can’t stop thinking about my grandmother.

I didn’t much care for visits from Grandma when I was a kid. She would arrive by plane from remote Western Canada with her news of relatives I didn’t know, and an energy that thoroughly disrupted the lazy peace of my existence. She was constantly busy, attempting to enlist me for all kinds of projects: deep cleaning the kitchen, darning socks, knitting, gardening, and baking tough little rhubarb muffins. I found none of it even remotely appealing. I was a child of the 80s. I had an Atari.

It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how cool she was.

This was a woman born in 1910. To say it was a different time is a gross understatement. The zipper hadn’t been invented yet.

She was the youngest of six children born to Ukrainian immigrants in a farming community north of Edmonton, Canada. Although her family had moved into a wood-frame house by the time she was born, she once told me a story from her childhood when a fire sent the whole lot of them temporarily back to their soddie – basically a dirt house that was dug into a hill and topped with turf to keep the weather out. She said it was an adventure.

She shared that with me, I realize now, as a parable about thriving through hardship and the importance of resilience. I’m embarrassed to recall that I responded by smart-assing her a question about why she was so concerned about our house being clean when she couldn’t possibly have kept the dirt off of those floors. You know, since they were made of dirt.

“Well, we swept them, dear,” she responded in her raspy hug of a voice, handing me a broom and pointing me toward the kitchen. I didn’t realize at the time that there was nothing I could possibly do to rattle her. She had seen it all.

She was eight when the Spanish flu swept through her community, taking her mother. She came of age late in the roaring 20s and hit adulthood just in time for the markets to crash into the Great Depression, where she lived through unemployment rates over 20 per cent and a catastrophic drought that crippled countless farms through rural Alberta. Coming out of all of that, she fell in love, got married, and started her family… just in time to send her husband off to fight in the Second World War.

She was tiny, five feet on a good day, but her energy gave her a presence that belied her physical size. I never once heard her ask why all that hardship landed on her lifetime. She didn’t complain. Despite everything she went through, nothing could crush her positive spirit.

The last time I saw her was a few days before she passed at age 91. She had an end-of-life type of cancer that wasn’t treatable, and I went to her home in Edmonton to say goodbye. Mom claims the day I got there was the first in Grandma’s whole life that she couldn’t get out of bed. Propped up on extra pillows, her blue eyes still sparkled even as she tried to hide the discomfort the illness was causing her. She asked me to open her closet and pointed out items on the racks for me to model for her.

She knew she didn’t have much time left. She told me she wanted to sort through her closet because she couldn’t bear to think about her beloved things piled up in some charity shop, but it was clear she had a deeper purpose. She wanted to share her story through these treasures: The shearling coat her husband bought her while they worked together on the Canadian National Railway as newlyweds. A suede skirt she wore to organizing meetings during the Second World War. A gold lame dress that sparkled through the seventies with her. The classic woolen three-quarter length coat in the faintest blush of her signature pink that warmed her through the last of her 91 frigid Edmonton winters. I still wear that coat.

Grandma’s memory has been with me today as I started the morning setting up a bowl of sourdough starter on my kitchen counter so my neighbor downstairs can still have her avocado toast through a bread shortage. I’m so thankful for her life lessons right now. She shared with me her depression-era values about making muffins out of even the toughest, sourest plant in the garden; mending instead of discarding to extend the life of things you have; and the deep cleaning skills she brought forward from the last global pandemic. I’m going to need all of it. But most of all, I’m going to need her relentless optimism because it’s that spirit – her spirit – that is going to get us through this.

We can do this.

I wish I had a photo of my grandmother to share with you, but these are just some random hands from the internet.