Bitterness and Longevity.

If you're looking for a post on a family members' death that is reverent and not borderline in bad taste, then you've come to the wrong blog.  If you're looking for just that and the way only I can remember a dead family member, then read on.  You might get a laugh out of this, or call me some terrible names and try an intervention.  Whatever, read on.

This post has been a long time coming.  A long time thought about and a long time written, but only in my head.  This won't be the last post on this decidedly accurate and true topic, as it adequately and truthfully describes the two things that run in my family, bitterness AND longevity.  Well, AND skin cancer if you count that now..  Dammit.

Every single one of my immediate family (and this statement is made possible by the fact that I have an insanely small family, especially when compared to that of the typical Southern American family) was still living....until Thursday of last week.

That was when I couldn't sleep.

When my 3 week old son, COULD and I did what I usually do at 3am, which was fumble for my iphone in the dark, check Facebook, make a rude and insensitive comment on someone's wall or photo post, have a go at an attempt for using all my characters in a words with friends challenge (and fail and use a three letter word that ends in "at", instead), watch Family Guy streaming from Netflix on my 3 inch screen and check my email accounts, all in the dark, all when I can't sleep.

And there it was, bitterness and longevity, ended for a family member.  My Grandma Warrell.  Never knew my grandfather on my Dad's side, so for many years, I've been able to proudly say that every single old family member is still living.  Because all that runs in my family for diseases, is Bitterness and Longevity.  And it's actually still true, even though Grandma Warrell died.

Grandma Warrell was 97 years old.

Less than 3 years away from gettting a letter from the Queen.  Yes, it is from her department and the Queen doesn't actually sign the letter, but you still get it and not just a half arsed attempt at national celebrity while Wilfred Something-or-other mis-pronounces your name in a what seems to be a casually bigoted almost racial slur on national television, all while they show your 100 year old face on the side of a smuckers jar.

A bloody jam jar.

A sponsored segment.

You turn 100, simultaneously beat the average Caucasian number of years spent alive by at least 26 and smuckers gets this segment as added value to a buy they over purchased on NBC using their only highly rated program, the Today Show, as a make good.  Congrats you're 100, here's an equally old gentleman who forgets he is actually on TV long enough to say your name as they display a photo of you, which, I'm sure you would rather be one from your TWENTIES, rather than the wrinkly shrinked shell of your former self that you are today.

Grandma Warrell didn't get the smuckers jar, or the letter from the Queen, but she sure lived long enough to carry on my family trait, bitterness and longevity. 

As a granddaughter, as any grand children do, I had the most one sided selfish relationship with my Grandma Warrell, you rarely engage or care what is going on in their lives, but they revel in yours.  Something you try to fix as you get older and something I hope to fix in my young kids to make a little less one sided.

Grandma Warrell was a funny old duck.  I think she was actually clinically paranoid for most of her life...and it showed.  I didn't know her struggles, if she lived through a war, what hardships she faced, or anything like that.  Perhaps I did, perhaps she did tell me, but I was too one sided to listen.  Here are the things I do know and remember about her.

Grandma Warrell is remembered the way almost all grandmums are.  For their unique powdery smell .......and for another few ridiculous quirks.

Grandma Warrell would "attend" breakfast every morning at our family table on the times she would stay at our house on Trent Street in Brisbane (Australia).  She would join us, with full make up in effect.  I would marvel at the layers of perfectly pressed flesh colored powder on her face, surely at least one centimeter deep, masking the elderly crevices in her face.  The carefully and tightly drawn on brown eyebrows that stayed and never moved with her facial expressions, and the bright red lipstick that would stain and forever remain on our tea cups.  Even after Grandma Warrell left our house, her lipstick on the tea cups, would remain.  She would carefully get her two pieces of delivered toast and place them in a tent position, upright, leaning on each other and I always thought I would rush my hand underneath this "toast tent" she had created only to have it crashing down and have her cruse or growl at me, which is something Grandma Warrell, never, ever did.  I'm not sure she would have ever growled at me, and I'm not sure that she would have ever cared to, either.

Her hair would be in rollers and her laugh would be loud and raucous, I think this is where I get my laugh from, from Grandma Warrell.

She was always short, little and weird.  She also shrank with the passing years, as most old folk do.

She survived many mishaps and lived to tell about them.  She was so little in her 70s/80s, that she once, while ready to board a train at a railway station in Sydney (on the way to one of her many dance classes and dates she would attend during her 70 and 80's years) accidentally slid in-between the train and the platform, and landed on the tracks, in between the train and the railway platform, on the ground.  I'm not making this up.  I'm sure it was serious at the time, but all I can remember now, is laughing about it and her laughing about it too.  I'm not sure that any serious damage was done, or maybe she did break a hip after this, again, I'm not sure, I was very one sided.

Grandma Warrell had the most horrible, horrific handwriting.  A serial killer would be proud.  It would take an FBI specialist to decipher it.  And when us regular old family members tried, it ended in laughter as we often made up words as to what she might have written, making it even more hilarious.  Grandma Warrell wouldn't just send a letter in the mail, she would write a short story, a humorous account of something that happened to her, something she thought I'd be interested in, or some local event, attach several newspaper clippings and always, ALWAYS, write a PS, PPS, PPSS, PPSSS.

Grandma Warrell never knew how old I was.  When I was 8, she'd mail me a card that said "Happy Birthday to a 10 year old".  And when I was 10, she'd mail me a card that said "Happy Birthday to an 8 year old."  She always handmade our birthday and Christmas gifts.  This, was very thoughtful.

Awful, but so very thoughtful.

She always made clothes for my mother that was big enough for a German beer wench before meeting Jenny Craig and clothes big enough for me and my sister to "grow into" made from fabric that if we ever decided to give up on fashion at all and live amongst potato sacks, we'd be set.

Grandma Warrell was from Germany.  I didn't know this fact until recently (last 10 years or so) but her last name was shortened in order to avoid sounding "German Jew" to escape the Nazis, or at least this is the crazy shit my family makes up in order to feed me lies.  Or the crazy shit I make up in my head after hearing stories that I like to colorfully exaggerate and later recall in an outlandish manner.  Her family was Jewish.  I'm a 16th Jewish.  I'm catholic, but one 16th Jewish.  I'm also Irish, German and largely British, again, possible lies I'm told.

I was asked by my Auntie Chris to write something for Grandma Warrell's eulogy this week, and mercifully, it wasn't this.  It was a much "softer" version of this post.  Still truthful, the only way I know how, accurate, yet "soft".  I'm not going to know everyone at her funeral, after all,  I don't want complete strangers to know that I'm a insensitive weirdo, only family members.  Geez.


Cheers to you, Grandma Warrell, maybe one day I'll see you again if I'm not residing in the below heaven zipcode (likely) or if there's an afterlife and I'm not re-spawned or reincarnated as a spite filled, vengeful, rodent-hating, half-starved cat.

And let this serve as a warning to any of my other family members, if you die, I could write about it.  Or it could be worse, I could write about you while you are still living, and it could be awkward for the both of us.