In memoriam
It looks like I won’t be going to the funeral after all.
My dad shared these photos of my grandma and her family. The first was taken many years ago in the Ecuadorian jungle.
(My little mother is in this photo – she is the youngest daughter.)
This more recent photo was taken after the deaths of my grandma’s husband and of her second daughter, Irene.
You can see how cheerful my grandma was.
She also was one of the most studious people I have known. She constantly read the Bible and books about the Bible. Her sight was very poor, and so, using a magnifying glass, she would proceed slowly; and because of the effort it cost, she would read little else – she placed God first. But when I was young and she could see well enough, she made for me a tape recording of all of Charlotte’s Web.
You’ll recall that after my grandpa died, I mentioned the books that he and my grandma had written together. They were narrated from his perspective. But she was not the lesser author.
He was rather legendary – a Great Man, I’ve heard people say. He was a force. But so was she. He would have needed someone like her to keep up with him. I remember watching a presentation that they used to do for U.S. churches. They would speak the Shuar language to each other; and, as was customary in dialog between the older Shuar, one of them would begin to speak before the other had finished his or her sentence, so that there was no pause between the utterances.
I used to talk to her quite a bit. She would listen, and she was not intolerant of my opinions, but there was no changing her mind. She had long before decided which path to take, and she tenaciously continued down it. It is better to be like this, I think, so long as one goes in the right direction.
Which, of course, she did.
My dad shared these photos of my grandma and her family. The first was taken many years ago in the Ecuadorian jungle.
(My little mother is in this photo – she is the youngest daughter.)
This more recent photo was taken after the deaths of my grandma’s husband and of her second daughter, Irene.
You can see how cheerful my grandma was.
She also was one of the most studious people I have known. She constantly read the Bible and books about the Bible. Her sight was very poor, and so, using a magnifying glass, she would proceed slowly; and because of the effort it cost, she would read little else – she placed God first. But when I was young and she could see well enough, she made for me a tape recording of all of Charlotte’s Web.
You’ll recall that after my grandpa died, I mentioned the books that he and my grandma had written together. They were narrated from his perspective. But she was not the lesser author.
He was rather legendary – a Great Man, I’ve heard people say. He was a force. But so was she. He would have needed someone like her to keep up with him. I remember watching a presentation that they used to do for U.S. churches. They would speak the Shuar language to each other; and, as was customary in dialog between the older Shuar, one of them would begin to speak before the other had finished his or her sentence, so that there was no pause between the utterances.
I used to talk to her quite a bit. She would listen, and she was not intolerant of my opinions, but there was no changing her mind. She had long before decided which path to take, and she tenaciously continued down it. It is better to be like this, I think, so long as one goes in the right direction.
Which, of course, she did.