The Last of a Generation

This afternoon, I received the unexpected news that my grandmother passed away last night in her sleep. These things do happen, of course, but she still seemed active and healthy enough for her age when I saw her a few months ago at Christmas. The timing of it was just a surprise.

A little less than six years ago, when her husband died, it was just 2 days from when I was going to be flying out to Indianapolis on a business trip, and would have seen him again at a dinner. Today, we're just 3 days away from my oldest sister's wedding, which my grandmother had been planning to attend -- I would have seen her again. Even at their respective ends, it seems the two really were cut from the same cloth and meant to be together.

My grandmother was a very loving and caring person, and I'm very happy to say that I got to learn how much so before she passed away. When I finally worked through all my fears and got the nerve to come out to my family and friends, she was a big question mark. Well... actually... she wasn't at all. She had spent her entire life as a deeply religious woman, with staunchly conservative views. I suspected she'd have a hard time with the news, and her own daughter my mother thought so too. I was very seriously entertaining the notion of just never telling her.

But it was another wedding, of another of my sisters, that ended the feasibility of that "plan." My grandmother was going to be attending, and so was my boyfriend, and even if I'd had the energy for some sort of masquerade, I no longer had the desire -- for so very many reasons. So a few weeks before the wedding, I wrote my grandmother an e-mail (yes, I had a grandmother in her 70s that used e-mail) and told her the truth about me. I invited her to call if she wanted to talk about it -- or not to, if she wanted that.

Two days later, she did indeed call, and we talked for a while. I wasn't sure what questions she'd want to ask -- very few, as it turned out. Mostly, she just wanted to hear my voice, it seemed. At the end of the call, she basically said, "well, you sound the same as you always have." And that was that. She came to the wedding, met my boyfriend, and it wasn't any kind of issue at all. She came back for Christmas, and was no different with he and I than she was with my middle sister and her husband, or my oldest sister and her (for the next few days) fiance. And it never seemed like she was making any effort to accept me. She just did.

My preconceptions were completely wrong. In a situation where I was asking her not to look at me any differently than she always had, I was made the hypocrite -- I assumed that she would be different than she always had.

She was the last of my grandparents. I never knew the first, who died before I was born. Two others passed away before I told anybody I'm gay. But one got to know the real me, if only for a few months. And I got to know more about her too as a result.

I'm very fortunate to have had her in my life, and I will miss her.