#look i that mae would end up like his grandmother and just kinda stick around and work with a valar

[youareunbearable]

Im really fond of the idea, that before the light of the Two Trees went out, it was encouraged that young Elves (especially those of the royal families) would apprentice in one the Houses of the Valar. They might learn from the Valar themselves, but they mostly work with the Maiar and the older Elves that work or study there

The Noldor normally apprentice with Aluë, for they share love and talent for crafting and smithing, or they go to Tulkas, for they also have a love of using the weapons and armour they create

When the time for apprenticeship was upon Maedhros, the first grandchild of Finwë and future ruler of the Noldor, everyone expected him to follow in his family's footsteps. Both his father and mother were brilliant artists and they were Aulë's favourite craftsmen and he would gladly love to tutor and guide their child in whatever field he chooses, if its gold work, jewelry, smithing, or masonry

So everyone was shocked when Maedhros instead chose to work alongside Nienna

People whispered and gossiped about why the Youngest Noldor Prince would choose to work alongside the Winter One, he seemed too cheerful and beautiful and full of life and joy to be working for the Mistress of Death

But then they see him comfort and coo at his younger siblings and cousins when they tumble and teach them to push through their fear and hurt and keep moving forward, or act as peace maker between his uncle and father, or just always be there for a sympathetic ear, the people understand and forget that it was ever an issue

It wasn't until later that those same people quaked upon the sight of Maedhros, Eldest Son of Fëanor, the one who has grief and world ending sorrow embeded into his very marrow and uses it as the strongest armour ever crafted so that blows and deep cuts that would wreck others hardly makes him stumble, who can take the burning of tears and the fire of a throat scraped raw from wailing and use it to rend whole cities into ash and ruin

Yes, Maedhros, Eldest Son of Fëanor, Oath Taker, Kinslayer, and former High King of the Noldor knew Grief well. He worked and labored under her for most of his life, was reunited with her frequently and with great intensity many time both on the shores of Valanor and off, and in the end, he was the first and only of the Elven to embrace her so fully he willing let her curl up into his heart and mind and threw himself into the Mistress of Death's open and waiting arms

[shanellms]

September 16th

Dedication: Every day you cross my mind, some days it’s harder to miss you than others. Really fast, I just kinda wanted to say that I love you. You may not be able to read this, but somehow I know that you will know that I wrote this. I love you Grandma. I miss you more and more each day. Christmas this year was different, but it still happened. The snow globes we got from Grandpa and Aunt Julie make us think about you. Mine is on the shelf above my bed for a reminder of how much I miss you.

There are many reasons why 2012 will not be my favorite year. Mainly because of the loss I experienced. Yes, I knew it was going to happen, but this was more pain that I thought would be present when someone passed. My entire family misses her. She was there for everyone in my family. She could have been mad at anyone and everyone in the family and yet she would still do anything for us. She loved baking and if you needed help with it she would do it. I have a lot of childhood memories of her and not as many as a young adult since she died when I was 14.

Her birthday was May 29th, 1931 she was given the name Helen Mae Peart. She grew up on a dairy farm in Evanston, Wyoming. My Grandpa Gerald went to the same high school and graduated 3 years earlier. I guess even though she was younger they could still be considered high school sweethearts. They married the week of her high school graduation. She had her graduation, 18th birthday and wedding all in one week. When you see a young couple you think “awe those two are a cute couple,” and as they get older they show the true dedication and love to each other. When the couple has been together for longer than 50 years and you see a big, strong and tall man at his small tiny wife’s side as she falls ill; that is true love. You may know at 18 what you need, but the true test is 50 or 60 years later when a spouse gets sick and the other is able to comfort and help them with literally anything they need. Driving to doctors appointments, medications and hand feeding someone bite by bite. That is love. They loved to the end and beyond. They were married for over 63 years. I saw the Pixar movie Up shortly after she passed. It killed me because I saw how much it reminded me of my grandparents lives; getting together so young and showing love until he was a widower. It was tough to see, and I turned it off fairly quick after that to compose myself.

My grandmother was a very creative woman. Could make an Afghan, or crochet blanket, without a pattern. She also created her own game called Merry Christmas Bingo, and that game has been played for decades. The game consists of many old stickers that have some connection to Christmas. My favorites are the pink angel, the precious moments nativity and the kitty with the present, and she enjoyed when they would be called in the game. She loved all of the pieces and made the game all by herself and it had to have taken many hours and a lot of planning and concentration. To some this game seems like it is just a family tradition, but to us it is more than that; the memory of my grandma.

My grandma’s passing was a blessing to her; she was probably in so much pain, but hardly showed it. She was happy to be around the family and loved to be at their Boulder Lake Cabin. Sitting in the living room looking out the enormous windows at the hummingbirds and the chipmunks. It was a simple place to be and enjoy. Her passing hurt the family because there was so much more to live and see. She didn’t get to go to any of my high school events; not graduation, nor my induction to National Honor Society. She was not able to see my college graduation. She wasn’t able to meet some of her great-grandchildren. All we can do is believe that she is in a better place once she had passed and she will be able to see all of those things as they happened just from a different place and one where she couldn’t hug us when we were upset or congratulate us in our accomplishments.

Here is the hard part. I still remember what happened the day she passed as if it were yesterday. Here is some prior events; she had heart surgery almost two years prior to her death. As she recovered from surgery she began to get sick in some way I am still unsure of. By the end she was just so weak she needed care all the time and my Aunt Julie and Grandpa were the ones doing it. The few weeks before she passed she was in the hospital and she spent around a 10 and 14 days there before being put on hospice care for almost a week. The time she was in the hospital my dad would visit daily; some nights he was working and he would either grab a quick dinner on the way or wait until after he left the hospital. It was hard to see. I didn’t go every night. Going to the house after she went home was tough too because we had to see her falling and tearing our heart strings. Getting back to the day she passed; my mom forewarned me that we would be going to their house for a family dinner that night. I didn’t want to go because it was hard to see. I hung out with friends that day and actually got asked out by my friend taking me out the following Saturday for the Homecoming Dance. I was so happy. I was in such a good place. Dinner was to be at 6pm. I met my family there because my friends dropped me off. The dinner was small, just my immediate family, my grandpa and my aunt, but we were the only ones at the table. Grandma stayed in bed. After dinner was over we visited briefly but since it was a school night we had to go home. We left around 8pm. My dad and I stood over her looking at how she looks so exhausted. I knew there was something going on when my dad kissed her on her forehead, but I let it go since I knew how much my dad loved his mom. My parents were sneaky, they took us home and then came up with a practical story; they were going to go help move my grandma to avoid blood clots and bedsores from being in the same place for too long. There was a lot on my mind with all of the homecoming events and spirit days and I needed to be prepared as a new high school student. I didn’t mind them going back to help with such things. But the next afternoon changed everything. My parents were protecting us for the next day and allowing us to have one more day believing that she was doing ok in her home. I would find out when I got home that September 17th, Monday afternoon that my grandmother had passed on the previous night around the time we had left to go home. The week prior to these event my parents sat us down and told us of the inevitable; they told us that we should be prepared and that it wouldn’t change our feelings except that we knew it was coming quickly she was tired of fighting. I had to go to school Tuesday and tell teachers that I would be absent the following Friday and that my head may not be in the right place. That was hard to do but by the end of the day I was so numb it got easier. Making up tests and working on assignments was the least of my worries. Thursday was the viewing and the homecoming bonfire. I was so upset about my grandma but I couldn’t handle being there. I walked out and called my friend bawling after leaving the viewing crying because it was just so hard to be at. My grandpa never cried in front of us because he knew it was better for her and knew that he had time to mourn her loss. I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried that hard. It was so much to grasp and being 14 was hard to hear that. Friday was hard because I wasn’t used to taking a day off school without being laid up sick. The funeral was at the Green River’s LDS church with graveside services in Evanston. Aside from Christmas, I don’t remember seeing so much family all together at once.

I will always love her. Sometimes thinking about her is tough for sure. She is loved. And it is tough even though we lost her that day. September 16th, 2012 will always stick out in my mind as being one of the toughest days for our family. Love you Grandma Helen.

[inmomorium-blog]

Episode 2:A Wild One in Every Generation of Women

Hello, I’m Matthew. This is In Momorium, a punnily named podcast about grief.

On this episode, we’re going to learn more about Debbie’s background by listening to her talking about her grandmother and then her mother. There are some digressions on mom’s part and some interruptions from me, both in 2009 and today.

A quick disclaimer, this recording was initially meant as notes for a writing project, and there are a lot of irritating background noises, including an obnoxious lovebird and some banging noises. I’ve cleaned it up as best I can, and it gets vastly better around the two-minute mark. There are some digressions on Mom’s part and some interruptions from me in 2009 and today, so please stick with us.

Now in her own words, here’s Debbie telling a tale of my two favorite mean old ladies.

 “Ninny was born on a farm near Paul’s Valley either 1904 or 1906 I don’t remember but she was born before Oklahoma became a state, it was still Indian Territory, and her daddy was a rancher, and her mother had a millinery shop, she made and sold hats, so Ninny always really liked hats, she always wore hats… So, um, her dad’s name was Lloyd, her mother’s name was Natti, her name was Cincinnati, and they called her Nattie, or Nat. and she had a uh, her older sister Alma, was the oldest and then she was the second child… and her father really wanted a son, and because the boys didn’t start coming until after Ila was born, he kind of made granny his boy, and they called her Bill or Billikins, although her name was Ila Inez, and she got out and rode horses and branded horses and raised hell and beat the hell out of all her brothers, and subsequently a good many of her husbands… She had six brothers and a younger sister.  

 Alma had two daughters, she had Magdalene and Lena Mae, and Magdalene was my hero, I always wanted to grow up and be like Magdalene, and I thought Magdalene was so tall, and as an adult I was way more than a head taller than Magdalene. There was a wild one in every generation of women, Ninny was the wild one in her generation, then Magdalene was the wild one in her generation, I was the wild one in my generation, then Audra was wild, now I guess Courtney is catching up, so something is happening to the generations.   

Granny lived at the farm, grew up at the farm, and left as soon as she could. She married Floyd (Charles Floyd Rushing) and they’d had Indianola when Ila was 18 or 19, I don’t remember. My mother lived with her dad and her grandmother, because Ila took off, she decided she didn’t want to be married anymore, and when Indianola was about three, she just left and left her there with her dad and her grandma, and lived the life of a flapper, she had all kind of neat stories about all these scrapes she was in, and these adventures that she had, she went from one end of the country to the other end of the country. Granny was, claimed to married 17 times, and I don’t recall her ever having gotten a divorce, but back then, I guess, If you were gonna party with her, you had to marry her, so she was married a whole bunch of times.       She would come and live with us for a while, then she and mother would get crosswise and so she’d pack her stuff up and she’d go away, then she’d come back. When I was small, mother worked in Doctor’s offices, and had to leave me at a nursery, and I never did like the nurseries and for whatever reason I would become annoyed with the nursery people, and then I would call my grandmother, who would come and get into a cuss fight with the people that owned the nursery, and get me thrown out and they wouldn’t take me back, but granny wouldn’t keep me, so she just would come and break me out of the nurseries and mother would have to find another nursery, so I went to a lot of nurseries when I was little …     Ninny owned restaurants and boarding houses, she always talked about being an “ole restrunt woman” and I remember one time when I was probably nine or ten years old, mother worked at the cigarette counter at a drug store at Jones-Balou drugstore that was at Britton road and May avenue… So granny picked me up after school and took me up to the drug store where mother worked, and was gonna buy me a hamburger, and they had a lunch counter that only was built up about half way, so that you could see the people sitting in the booths and you could see behind the area where they cooked, where the grill was, it was open, and we ordered my hamburger and I’m sittin’ there, and, granny hops up and says “You nasty son of a bitch you’re not cook a hamburger that I’m gonna by god eat!” and so she gets up and gets behind the counter and makes our hamburgers, and during that time, everybody in the store is running back there to get a look, because when she said that, she said it loud enough for them to hear it from down the block. And I was probably as mortified as I have ever been; I wanted to slink down out the booth and into the floor, that’s one of my most embarrassing moments. 

 But Granny was full of embarrassing moments; she would always do really strange things. She didn’t care who was around when she did, and some people thought that was her charm.    

“What about when your mother was little?” … She grew up on the farm, and “had to walk a mile to school with a potato in her pocket to keep her warm on her way to school and then it was her lunch” and when she was six, her dad remarried, and she never liked her step-mother, she thought her step-mother was just horrible, but I thought she was really nice. Bertha. The last I heard, she was still alive, and she’s 93 or 94. And with Bertha, Floyd had three more children, he had Willis Andrew, and Willy Calvin, and the daughter who was the youngest, was named Lila Clementine, when Lila married, she married a fellow named Bill Tinpenny, so her name was Lila Clementine Rushing Tinpenny, because of that, they called her “Sis” ...  They used to go all the time to the farm when Joey and Janice were little, I remember being drug down there a time or two, but I was always the city cousin that come visitin’ and all the little country cousins would make fun of because I didn’t want to roll around in the cow shit, and I was afraid of all the farm animals, and when we went down there I always stayed as close as I could to Bertha, because I didn’t want to be aggravated by all those other people. By the time I was ten or 12 years old, I put my foot down and said “I am no longer going to the farm” and I didn’t. The last time I went was when grandpa passed away…     

   When mother was 13, she made up her mind that her mother needed her, that she needed to go and live with her mother, and so she did. Living with her kind of consisted of them being “on the road”, they’d hitchhike one place then another or they’d go on the train, and there was a lady whose name was “Boots” she was married to uncle Gus at one time, now Marilyn wasn’t Gus’s child, but he was the stepfather she was the closest to, she was real fond of him and she kept in touch. They kinda ran with mother and granny for a while, the lived in Colorado for a while, they lived a few places.  Ninny and Boots Stayed buddies even though boots didn’t stay married to Gus.

Her first husband was Joe. She either got married at 14 and had Janice at 15, or married at 15 and Janice at 16. Mother had become sexually active and Granny pushed her into marrying Joe. She always contended that she didn’t love Joe, but between Joe and Granny, Granny was afraid she’d get pregnant and then Granny would be stuck having to raise the kids. So she coerced and urged her and kinda forced her into marrying Joe.

“Where’d she find him at?”

He grew up in Lindsay; they were all in Lindsay, that’s where Mother grew up. And, uh, I guess he was a Fuller brush man or something and he would come and visit her and bring her candy bars and sit on the porch and they would spark. But they got married and in the beginning, I know, she only stayed with him for maybe 10 year, 11 years, something like that. There were several times he beat the hell out of her. He beat her up one time when she was pregnant. And of course he was real demeaning. In order to keep her under his thumb, he was all “You know, nobody is gonna want you, and you’re stupid, and the only kinda job you’ll ever be able to get is slinging’ hash somewhere, you’re fat and dumb and ugly..” and all those kind of things. 

She went to work when Joey and Janice were in school. For a time she worked at Jackson Cookie Company, there was a cookie factory that was right by the house and she worked there. Then she went to work at the Capitol. She had made her mind up that she was ready to get loose from Joe about the time she got this job, and uh, she went out and got him an apartment and helped him get his linens and his dishes and all the things he was gonna need and packed his ass up and moved him out. 

Mother was quite a looker- I never saw that, but apparently she was extremely attractive when she was young. She had the real Lana Turner, kinda voluptuous sweater girl type of figure. I saw a picture of an office Christmas party when she was young, and the women were sitting along a sectional couch, and the men were standing behind the couch to pose for this picture, and every single one of the men were clearly, visibly ogling mother, and the other women they weren’t even looking at.

One time, Mother, we had a little friend I had fallen in love with when I was real small that worked as a soda jerk at the neighborhood drug store. That was a real popular place to go when I was young, that was where people would go to the lunch counters or go there for ice cream or sodas. This characters name was Wally, and he was crazy about Janice, and I was crazy about him. He carried me around on his shoulders and let me get back behind the bar of the drug store. Mother was sitting at the counter with, uh, somebody, and this guy came up to her and said “Lady, are you leavin’ pretty soon? Are you gonna be here for a minute?” and she said that she was. So he come back a little while later dragging this little girl, and drug his little sister clear over to the counter to see Mama, and told her to “Say hello to the purty lady!” and that’s a line we always used for everybody...

And she worked, and Mother, bless her heart, got involved with an awful lot of men who were married, and their wives never did understand em, and they were always gonna leave their wives and come and marry her, and they never did. 

After she passed away, I was always real close to Magdalene but I had spent a lot of time on the phone with her as mother was ill and when she died. Magdalene told a story about some guy they had known when they were young, and he lived out in the area where she lived, and she had gotten reacquainted with him, they talked, and they’d go out to dinner... by this time Magdalene was in her late 60s and so was this guy... and the guy had asked her to marry him, they were thinking about getting married. During one of their conversations he happened to mention that one of the most memorable afternoons of his lifetime was a rainy day that he was in a motel room above Kachi’s dance studio with Indianola. I guess Magdalene knew that he knew mother, but didn’t know that he knew mother quite that intimately. After that she broke it off with him, wouldn’t talk to him no more, wouldn’t have nothing to do with him, and obviously didn’t marry him.

Mother was real busy, and of course, back then women didn’t have, they didn’t get divorced as a general rule, and Mother and Granny both entertained quite frequently. Joey and Janice were embarrassed and shamed by the neighbors who had known Joe, and knew that they were married, and would keep track of the cars that would be spending the night with mother, and they’d asked the kids when they caught them out alone, you know, “Who was that that spent the night?”

Mother was real busy with her, uh, dance card.”

Next time on In Momorium, things take a darker turn as Debbie tells some family legends involving kidnapping, murder for hire, and murder for incestuous necrophilia.