Holidays and Family Portraits

This is a beautiful time of the year; the approaching holidays filled with sentiment and tradition, the New Year on their heels bringing hope and new life. The actual holidays are much less important to me than the season they reside in. Appropriately, in this time of looking back, I received a note from my mother. It contained two articles about my Grandfather, written when he retired as CEO of Security Life.

Unfortunaty, I know my Grandparents more in theory than reality, through the stories my mother tells and childhood memories. Over the past couple years, my once brilliant and mysterious Grandpa began to fade away. His body remained healthy and strong, but his mind was crumbling under the crule (and undiagnosed) onset of alzheimers. During the past year it became too severe to ignore; he was offically diagnosed and sent to live in an inpatient facility.

Something else was crumbling with his mind, the family portrait my mother had painted and I had come to know. My grandparents, the madly in-love couple who adored one another and said "to hell with the rest of the world". The brilliance of my quiet grandfather and the fiesty vigor of my wild grandmother. The picture perfect love that spanned six decades. My mother idolized and adored them.

As my Grandfather's mind began to go, so did the affection of my Grandmother. She became so angry at her abandonment, at losing her best friend and provider. The cruelty my mother saw from her seemed to open an emotional pandora's box. The new picture painted was not that of an evil woman, but a cold one. The fun-loving Grandma was becoming more clearly the narcassistic one. It seems that this was always the case, but we have a way of painting the past in colors that suite us. Grandpa became the loveable old fool, unable to really relate, but at least happy and taken care of.

The emotional toll this took on my mother was significant, I only experienced it through her stories and tears. But, amazing woman that she is, she took everything in stride and made the most of it. We have all fallen into a state of acceptance, acknowledging the new family portrait as a basic reality.

She told me that she had ripped apart her home looking for an article, then miraculously found the original when visiting her mother. Until I read it, I did not understant the importance of these clippings.

The articles described a briliant man defined by unwaivering integrity. They described a man who came from nothing to become the CEO of a company, yet maintained the humility of the young army band leader he once was. They contained photographs of the quiet smiling face of the man I never fully knew, but always loved. And they showed a happy, fun-loving couple facing the great whells of their lives with a sparking humor in their eyes. This couple, in a room of executives, looked as though they had an inside joke, as though everthing around them was inconsiquential, just senery in the set of their lives that contained only the two of them and their adventures.

After reading the articles and looking at the pictures, I heard a familiar humming. A bum bum bum, the quiet drumline my Grandfather was always singing to himself as he walked through his home. This sound embodies the mysterious band leader and genious my Gradpa was to me. I could see him walking past me humming, with my happy Grandmother making me and my brother noodles in the kitchen behind him. I saw the old family portrait in a new light. The picture my mother painted me was real, if not complete. They were all the wonderful things she described, but they were in their own world built for two, we were just fortunant enough to be close enough to bear witness to it.

As the seasons change we remeber the past and bravely look toward the future. The memories we carry into the new season act both armor and compass, comforting us and pointing us toward (or away from) future possibilities. Perhaps this is why we have the holidays before the New Year, we must look back to look forward. Family is at the core of this reality, giving us a history and ideal to live-up to or surpass. In my tiny family I am so unbeleivably grateful for my mother's stories. She is the keeper of her parents' history and she passionatly gave that gift to me. No matter how much things change, and they always do change, the family portrait she gave me will live in my heart and mind, as my comfort and compass, forever.