Great-Grandmothers

I remember my grandfather telling stories of my great-grandmother being notoriously callous and hard. Not abusive, mind you; just with a steel exterior, little patience, and hard to love. She was not the quiet homemaker of her day that settled and married and turned into background noise with time; no, she was more akin to a small tornado, always blowing across landscapes, carrying the remnants of houses and cars and people wherever she chose to land.

He recounted to me once, fondly and with a touch of laughter in his deep voice, how sometimes he would arrive back home to their small farmhouse in Minnesota where he grew up, and he would know when she was in a sour mood, because he opened the door and smelled bleach. He didn't have to look inside the threshold to know that she was furiously attacking the house with a brush and mop, and he would "Drop my shit at the door and run to the neighbors' until sunset". 

As a child, and even into my teenager years, I never really stopped to consider why she was like that; why my grandfather respected, loved, and yet feared her, talked about her as if she was always at a distance, and also, in the end, how he didn't really seem to know her at all. 

My great grandmother graduated from her diploma nursing program at eighteen years old in Minnesota, out of a small town that spoke Norwegian as the primary language and English as the second, into a huge, angry world at war. She signed up for the Navy Nurse corps, and and served in ships across the world, putting countless soldiers in their place who dared to challenge her authority as an officer, and relished in the experience. 

Returning home, she was met with the 1918 Influenza pandemic, where she found herself tending to those dying around her in droves, most of them her own age. She recounted going to houses to check on neighbors and finding them dead; burying bodies in trenches outside of town dug by steam shovel because the dying piled too fast for the town to handle; rows upon rows of people drowning in their own lungs; communities shuttered and closed, with only the nurses and doctors working around the clock to stem the inevitable tide of the disease. 

My grandfather was born, out of wedlock and with no "proper" surname, in 1930 during the great depression. When the farm fell to the economic ruin of the times at the end of the decade, my great-grandmother packed everything including my grandfather, to San Francisco and joined the Navy nurse reserves, to serve in WWII. She never looked back.

I told stories of her to my own nine year-old, how much bravery it must have taken to look the world in the eye and refuse to back down, even when everything appeared to be falling to shambles. To serve as a nurse during a pandemic, two world wars, and to emerge on the other side into a new world with cars, electricity, telephones, airplanes and even computers.

Yet I never considered, until now, how much that must have weighed on her. I don't suppose I could have, really, until I carried some of the weight of the world myself, and then entered into another pandemic and world crisis while also serving as a nurse myself. Nurses have always carried those who cannot carry themselves, and in times of crisis, they will always carry more, even when it breaks them. 

Since the start of this pandemic, I have been finding myself pulling away from people, being less touchy, less emotional, more distant, more turned into myself. Self preservation, coping mechanisms, survival skills, whatever I might call it, I do find myself being harder to love lately, with more of a shell in place to keep away the burdens of the new world in which I've found myself. 

Nurses first and foremost want people to experience their humanity with dignity and grace; they want the best possible outcomes from birth to death, and they want everything in between to be connected to a greater whole, part of the human dynamic. 

In a pandemic, everything human is thrown upwards and outwards and completely forgotten; death is a bloody, grotesque, and exhausting fight to the end, and families are torn away from one another as restrictions are placed to protect the rest of the population. The dignity of disease and death as a human experience is gone, replaced by cold walls and rushing people, leaving everyone feeling bereft, stranded, isolated, and very much alone, unsure of what the new side of the world will eventually look like. 

My great-grandmother survived her world, but she was fiercely independent, closed off, and hard-headed as a result. She never was able to really take down her shields, or perhaps chose not to, even at the very end. She survived the world, and raised an amazing child within it, but I can't say for certain if she ever really thrived in it. 

I often have sat awake at night lately, unable to sleep, wondering if the steel exterior I have started to put into place to survive some ugly aspects of this will forever stay in some form or another; if I'll be able to take it down entirely one day. I worry, more each day, how the weight of all those I'll carry from this will feel with time, what other experiences and people I will be expected to carry in the years to come, and if I can even manage to do it all and maintain my humanity. 

Out of the late nights lately, sitting quietly alone in a dark house trying not to wake those around me, I've come to realize with startling clarity why in the end, my great-grandmother perhaps chose to stay hard to love.