My grandmother and I had
a very special relationship. She’s been gone thirty years, yet there isn’t one
day that I don’t remember her in some way. Sometimes, it’s a recipe, or how to
do a chore, or a saying, but she is right there, next to me.
She lived with us since before
my birth until she passed away in her eighties. As a child I resented having a
third parent, but somewhere in my late teens, we became friends, almost like
comadres. She would share details of her life to me and I would learn from the
many sacrifices she endured.
Her father died when she
was twelve and almost overnight, she, her mother, and siblings went from being
well off to being dirt poor. My grandmother ended up working for the woman who
used to be their laundress. She married
young but my grandfather was no better off than she was, so my grandmother
worked as a live-in maid and my grandfather worked as a laborer, doing odd jobs
and going off for months to do migrant work in the northern states.
He rarely sent home money
to help house and feed their children, so the burden landed on my grandmother.
Sadly, he was an alcoholic, so even when he made good money, it never made it
home to my grandmother and their family.
My grandmother told me that
my mother and her other children learned to hide what little money they had in the
house because my grandfather would spend all the money he earned on alcohol,
then he would come home to steal whatever money they might have. My mother, her
older sister, and their three younger brothers often went hungry, so as soon as
they could work, they did odd jobs to earn some. They would hide most of it in a tin can that
they buried in the ground while they kept some out where my grandfather could
find it.
My mother’s siblings grew
up. The three brothers joined the
service and moved away. My mother
married and soon after her sister did too. My mother invited my grandmother to
come live with us when I was a baby, and my grandfather would come visit us
occasionally. He would stay for a while,
only long enough to squeeze money off my grandmother and my mother. My mother
would refuse him but my grandmother would give him some. Having learned from
her children, my grandmother knew to hide her money and only show him the
amount she could afford to lose to him.
Toward the end of her
life, I asked my grandmother if she regretted anything. I thought I knew what she would say, but
instead she said, no.
She said that at any
time, we have a choice to change our lives.
If we don’t, then we cannot “regret” our choices. We accept our lives
for what they are and move on. She advised me to live my life with no regrets.
She said if I didn’t like my life (at the time, I was struggling with my first
marriage), and I had given it my all but it still wasn’t what I wanted, then I
needed to change my life.
At the end, I should look
back and have no regrets. I miss that old lady every single day of my life.
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