WE END UP WHERE WE BEGAN!

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

The attached photograph depicts a snippet of a reunion of my large family on my mother’s side that occurred on a sultry August day of 1980. Throughout the hours, Lena, my maternal grandmother, was visited, one by one or in groups, by her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I could have hidden out in all the hustle and bustle of the gathering and easily avoided paying my respects to my grandmother. If I had done so, she might not even have noticed. But I didn’t hide; I didn’t avoid, and instead I knelt down timidly on my then-flexible, 37-year-old knees and genuflected like a lapsed worshipper before a stone idol. And then I mouthed some meaningless sentiments.

 

That very day, Lena was one month shy of her seventy-ninth birthday, not a whole lot older than I am now. I see my current self in the then-Lena, although thanks to some wondrous genes passed along to me via my father, I look several years younger than Lena did then. But appearances are deceiving in this case. Lena lived another twenty and a half years after that day. The day she died, only eight months shy of her one-hundredth birthday, she had outlived her husband and seven of her eight children, and some of her grandchildren. Anyone who would lay odds on my reaching such a milestone would be making a risky bet. If by some strange twist of fate I do manage to avoid “shuffling off the mortal coil” until the end of a ninth decade of life, it will be a medical miracle, or more probably, a spiritual marvel beyond human comprehension.

 

Lena is the standard-bearer of my family of a truly good person, perhaps even of a holy person. Skeptics might jump to the conclusion that I am biased in my labeling of her as possibly “holy,” attributing it to family loyalty and love. Skeptics might also be influenced by a belief in the “impossibility” of the existence of a truly holy person. But Donald Nicholl reminds us in his book, HOLINESS, that if there was a Mother Teresa who walked among us in her time, odds are in favor of there being others of her kind.

 

If your experience is like mine, then you know that holy persons are dangerous to us sinners, especially grandma holy persons, because they possess a kind of laser vision that grants them an otherworldly power to read the true meaning behind our shifty eyes, or “the whispers in our brain,” to restate British author Graham Greene. And those grandma scans hurt like the dickens. They’re like a scalpel to the heart and a drill to the brain without novocaine. The other thing is, though, that holy grandmas can be so darn tricky. They can just as easily show up for us sinners as our comforter and healer. That uncertainty in their response moves us to keep as much distance between ourselves and them as humanly possible, at times.

 

Not unlike most fledglings, I built castles in my mind when young, precise citadels of a marvelous future impervious to heartbreak or any other catastrophe. By the time I was 37, I had found out that mine were castles built on sand. I make use of the cliché here for its exactness—for not only were my castles stripped away by tides of heartbreak and swallowed-up in whirlpools of catastrophe, but I was left broken and lost and clueless as to how to get on with the rest of my life. Nobody ever told me I needed a backup plan. The upshot was that I made some pretty awful choices. While all the drama lit the spark that made of me a writer, my transition from helpless to competent was a much slower burn.

 

When I look at the photograph now, I see the tension I felt in Lena’s presence then. I remember my sense that maybe she could not only see but also smell my transgressions on me, and I was afraid and ashamed and unable to give myself over to expressing physically the companionship I felt for her in my heart. Self-absorption is so very unjust all around!   

 

I speak for my family in stating that on this the day of Lena’s 120^th birthday, we bow in reverence to her, to the memory of her or the spirit of her or whatever embodiment of her squares with our individual beliefs. I, for one, see her in my mind’s eye as she was on that August day of 1980, but with a vital change in the scene, one in which the gap between Lena and me is eliminated—just as it was when I was a wee child—when for a while, Lena and I were each other’s closest companion.©

 

Lena is the heart of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, multi-award-winning author Linda Lee Greene’s novel based on a true story. If you wish to read more about Lena, just click on the following blue link and it will take you straight to the Amazon page where you can purchase the book. It is available worldwide in paperback and eBook. http://goo.gl/imUwKO

 

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