My Grandma

It’s so hard to put into words what has been happening over the past week.

Over the past few years, my grandma has been struggling increasingly with her health. Severe osteoporosis has left her with multiple injuries and increasing pain, among other various physical problems. We have been caring for her and supporting Papa as he cares for her much of the past year, but she began a steep decline a little more than a week ago. Now, the family is taking shifts around the clock to care for her and Papa as she prepares to meet her precious Savior.

I don’t want to talk too much about the current situation though, I want to tell you about how she lived and about the man who has loved her for 60 years.

My grandma, Virginia Ellen Withrow, is an interesting woman with a story unique among those of her contemporaries. She was born into a large family in the mountains of West Virginia. I’ve heard her talk about being young and having the job of wringing the chicken’s neck for dinner or churning the milk to make butter. The usual path for girls in her area and time period was to get married as soon as possible. She had a sister who was married at 14 years old! But following trends wasn’t her thing.

She attended school through high school graduation, quite an accomplishment in those days, even skipping a grade to graduate early with her brother Claude. After graduation, she began working at various jobs and was very content to be single. She found her stride as a stock market runner. Her job was to update the numbers on the stocks as the information came in so that the traders could buy and sell. She even had her picture in the local newspaper when they featured a story on the stock market office.

The only hitch to her career was her hair. She had long, beautiful wavy hair but it got in the way with her very physical job, and the room often got very hot. She often threatened to cut it off and was chided by her male superiors about how that would be such a shame. Undeterred though, and after debating about it for a while, she popped into the local barber shop on her way to the bus one afternoon and chopped it all the way off. That is how her signature style of a super short, pixie-like cut with pin curls was started. It’s a look that she has maintained to this day. Again, her sense of practicality and her personal preference was stronger than the pull of following the crowd.

It wasn’t until the ripe old-maid age of 25 that she was set up on date with a man who was barely an acquaintance.  At the last minute, with the man waiting in the car in their driveway, she announced that she just wasn’t interested in going. Her sister, however, forced her out the door and that’s when she found her soulmate in my Papa. After dating for about 2 months, he proposed in October and they were married on January 12th, 1957. They were married in the local pastor’s living room, with his brother Charlie and his wife, and her brother Claude and his wife with them as witnesses. After the ceremony, they went back to her house to have dinner with her parents. Both sets of parents were approving of the match, but weddings just didn’t merit a trip to town. How things have changed! From wearing your favorite church dress to be married in a living room, to a day of ultimate extravagance, to which you wear a dress that may have cost you a small fortune on its own!

They stayed in West Virginia and had a calm start to their life together until she became pregnant with my dad. The pregnancy was very hard on her and she nearly lost her life and my dad. Because of this, the doctors told her she could never have another baby. Grandma came from a family of eight kids and Papa came from a family of ten kids, so it was a difficult blow to be told that their family would be capped at one. Still though, at least it was a boy with curly black hair like she had always wanted. They named him Paul (after my Papa) Martin and called him Marty for short.

When my dad was a young toddler, Grandma became a full time care taker for both of her parents who eventually died of cancer. They moved into the house with her parents, and she took on the nursing care of her parents as a new, and first time mom. I can’t imagine the drain of being a first time mother and full-time caretaker at the same time. It is telling of her strength and commitment to family. Family is everything to Grandma and always has been, no matter the cost.

Once both of her parents had died, her brother, Tom, who had moved to Florida, encouraged her and Papa to move down and join him and his wife. They liked the idea of escaping the cold winters and Florida offered much better jobs, so they packed up and moved 800 miles away from the only home they had known. This was so impressive to me because I struggle with big changes and fear of the unknown, and I inherited that trait from my grandma. She is a creature of habit and a self-admitted worry wort, so the fact that she was willing to uproot and move so far away into the unknown with a small child, again portrays her strength.

Fast forwarding to my earliest memories of her, as a child, I always looked forward to any chance of going to spend the night at Grandma and Papa’s house. It would usually start with an afternoon working with her and her pet chicken, Peewee, in the flowerbeds. Yes, you read that right, pet chicken. She found it torn to pieces by some sort of predator and she couldn’t stand to let the poor thing die so they rushed it to the vet where it had extensive surgery and treatments and eventually recovered. That silly chicken was her best friend from then on and was even trained to follow her around and peck out the little clover weeds in the garden.

But anyways, after working in the garden while Papa was sleeping, we would go inside and get cleaned up and enjoy some time together having dinner and then late night snacks of Fiddle Faddle or root beer floats and watch The Grand Ole Opry. We were allowed to be up way past our bedtime so that we could see Papa and “help him” eat his cereal and coffee with him before he would take off to work his third shift job. Then we would be tucked into bed in my dad’s old room and wait for the smell of breakfast to wake us up in the morning. Grandma’s breakfasts were infamous. She had perfected the art of her scratch made “cat head” biscuits (as my uncle Tom called them) or making mountains of toast with butter and apple butter or apple jelly, frying bacon, and frying eggs in the bacon grease until their edges were ruffled and the yolk was creamy. Then we got to choose either Tang or chocolate milk to drink. It was a feast, and the smell was indescribably heavenly.

After breakfast we would go shopping at the mall and be spoiled with a small toy or new clothes and then it was Happy Meal time and then we went back home. Those days were some of the sweetest and most fun of my childhood. Papa was always up for anything fun and kept us laughing and Grandma was always three steps ahead of us, leading the way. All of this was just normal to me, but looking back now, I see how special and unique it is that I have such awesome memories with my grandparents. They took us to the fair every year, they took us Easter dress shopping, they were at every single birthday party and every recital.

My grandma often called herself our “worldly grandma” because she wore pants, listened to country music, and often teased about bikinis and short shorts with us girls. However, she was anything but “worldly”. She had a deep and personal relationship with her Savior and was very committed to her church and her church family. She could easily be found every Sunday at Flowler Ave Baptist Church where she would sing in the choir, work in the office, help in the kitchen, or helping with cleaning. She wasn’t a perfect person, but she loved the Lord.

Of course, the guiding force and ever present encouragement from my Papa was a key factor in her life. She had a lot of nerve on her own, but she also counted on him to be her base of support and he would always and unwaveringly be there. My Papa is a force of nature in his own right. He is the most pleasant and jolly man you have ever met but don’t mistake that sixth sense of humor as the mark of instability. He has some of the most rock-solid faith and devotion to the Lord that you will ever have the honor of witnessing. The man has never met a stranger in his life and is ready at all times to reach out to anyone in need. As her health has declined, he has been the most faithful and loving partner that you can imagine. His devotion to her and his love for her knows no bounds, no limits.

As her life comes to a close, I just felt that I needed to write down some of the things that I want to always remember about her. She is going to leave a huge gap in our family and we will miss her terribly. I hope she knows how much we love her and how many smiles she has given me and will continue to give me in my memories.