My maternal grandmother is dying. As a matter of fact by the time you read this she will probably be gone. I’ve only talked with her once since 1982 and that one conversation was when she was already 93 and I had to remind her three times who I was and even then she didn’t seem all that interested. She stopped talking to me and my family due to a boring, inconsequential argument that offended her sense of vanity. When I tell people what I know about her – the fact that she was a Jewish, Russian immigrant who fled persecution, a woman who had been married several times and shot once in the back, a woman who buried two husbands and survived ovarian cancer, the fact that she had traveled all over the world including Alaska and China several times – she seems fascinating. Unfortunately those are not the things that I remember about her. Mainly I remember my mother crying – a lot.

Are you familiar with the story of Snow White? You know how the step-mother asks “who is the fairest of them all?” and then promptly tries to kill off the only other person who is prettier than her – even though that person is her step-daughter? Yeah, that is my mother’s relationship with my grandmother. It is not that my grandmother thought my mother was better than her as much as she couldn’t stand to have anything take away from her. She was incapable of putting her children and their needs before her own. My mother was not physically neglected but she was most definitely emotionally neglected. She was left to spend the rest of her life seeking her mother’s love and approval. My mother has purposefully told me at least every 24 hours of my life that she loves me — she never wanted me to doubt the one thing she never got.

I’m not sad about my grandmother dying. Maybe I should feel bad about that but I don’t. Halfway through my morning walk, as sweat was streaming down my back and my heart was pumping I stopped and cried. Not for my dying grandmother but for my mother. I was so angry that my grandmother could never stand up and be the mother she should have been.

My mother drives me crazy (as all mothers do to their daughters) but there are certain things that I have never doubted my whole life. My mother loves me. My mother is proud of me. My mother will always take care of me. My own mother has spent her whole life without having those certainties to build upon and now there is no hope of her ever having them.

The next couple of weeks are going to be hard on my Mom. I can’t fix it or make it easier or even tell her brother to “bugger off” (although I’d like to) but I do know that my mother is loved. Where my grandmother has left a vacancy their are hoards of people who have stepped up to fill that void. And since I can’t make this pain disappear I think I’ll just send her some ice cream.