What’s Taking Me So LONG!

Maybe not many, but a few people have wondered where I am and what I’ve been doing in the last few months. I grew up in my grandmother’s house in Arkansas. Last Fall, after the divorce was final, I went home and found her with a black eye. No one was abusing her or anything. She was falling down and landing face first.

You gotta know something about my grandmother. You hear about an older person falling and hurting themselves and the natural emotion is heartache, but for my grandmother? It’s something to laugh about. She’s always got a joke about the latest fall. She’s the kind of person who would say something like, “It’s Fall! So I did!”

A while back, my grandmother’s younger sister (84), who the family calls Aunt Mutt (!?), moved in with my grandmother after being abandoned by her family. Aunt Mutt is in much worse physical shape than my grandmother and she falls all the time too, and does more damage.

Nanny and Mutt joking about their falling all the time helps those of us around them not feel quite so bad, but we wanted to get them into a better situation. My grandmother, in her late 80s, owned a business until last Friday. She didn’t want to give it up, but she knew she wasn’t physically able to do what she needed to do to make it work. The family has encouraged her to sell it for years, but she wasn’t ready to make a change.

Finding her with a big black eye last Fall meant we were dealing with more than just a stubborn old lady or two. I snapped a photo of Nanny’s big black eye on my iPhone and sent it to relatives and decided I would stay with her and Aunt Mutt until we could get them to move to a safer place with loads of family around to love them and take care of them.

In that time, I had an existential crisis and a crisis of faith that I came through okay, but I also picked up old ladies who fell down laughing two or three times a week. I worry that it hurt my career and ability to start something new because I wasn’t making money in the bulk of that time and cost me money I would have been putting into what’s next, but I can’t imagine how I could have made a different choice.

Yesterday, we moved her out of the place she lived for forty years (and the place I grew up). I snapped another picture on my iPhone just before the family drove away and the look on her face gives me pretty good assurance that I did the right thing.

I’ve gotten back to work in a serious way and knowing that my grandmother is in a safe, beautiful new house, surrounded by grandkids and great grandkids frees me up to hopefully do something professionally that I can be proud of too again.

And ummmmm …. here’s a hint …