Big shoes to fill

Many of you who are friends of mine on social media have heard me brag about the superwoman that was my Mawmaw so you get to hear it again if you’re reading this.

This is my Mawmaw in 1946 with my Diddy in her arms:

Mawmaw’s name was Lillian Josephine and when she was a teen, the doctors diagnosed her with rheumatoid arthritis, what they called “crippling arthritis” back then. It seemed to have mostly effected her spine but it may have been in other areas as well. I don’t know because the woman didn’t complain. About anything. Ever.

Her daddy, George Washington Elliot, and his brother Carly, owned a sawmill and logged with oxen and still were not well off by any means but managed to take Mawmaw for treatments in Memphis while she was living with them in the early 40’s. The doctors told her by the time she was 18 years old, she would probably need a wheelchair full time. She proved them wrong by toughing it out until she was in her 20’s. Toughing it out was practically her middle name.

By the time that photo was taken above, she had been a 16 year old widow for a year. Her husband, my grandfather, Earl Lancelot Hornsby committed suicide by shotgun in the woods when she was 3 months pregnant with my Diddy while Mawmaw waited in the truck for him in her sister-in-law’s driveway. Earl had bleeding ulcers and was significantly older than my mawmaw and it is believed that the pain is what drove him to take his life. We have no real answers as he left us none.

A few years later, she was remarried to a verbally and physically abusive man with whom she had 8 more children. This ENTIRE brood right here minus the woman in the white dress second from left (that’s my mama) plus one missing daughter who was in Iowa at the time:

By this time, she was in the wheelchair full time and my father did not find out his step-father was hitting her until he had moved out of their house. She was always careful about hiding the bruises and his step-father had never hit her in his presence. There was an…altercation when Diddy found out about his mother being beaten and as far as we know, she was not hit again after that point. She may have just done a better job of hiding it. As I said, she never complained.

She never learned to drive since she was in so much pain with her back during the time she normally would have learned as a teen. Her world was confined to the four walls of her house and however far she could roll outside in the yard. Her husband got cancer in the late 70’s and she and her youngest child who was still living in the house at the time, cared for him through the prolonged illness until he became bedridden. She couldn’t physically care for him in that state but cooked and cleaned in an effort to support her son in caring for him. He passed away after about 6 years of illness. It was during this time of illness that I was born and learned what a rock this woman was who happened to be my grandmother.

She was a very curious person and even though she had no means of travel, she knew what was going on in the community before everybody else did. She took the newspaper and read it from front to back every day after waiting for whoever happened to drop by her house to bring it inside for her. She would get out of the wheelchair several times a day and stretch her back out on the bed while reading, watching the hummingbird feeder her family kept clean and filled for her, or just watching the cars going by her house. She knew who all of the cars belonged to and after we moved next door to her, if she didn’t recognize one, she would call my mama asking her if she had seen that car and did she know who it belong to? As I said, she was abreast of the goings and comings of the neighborhood. While she would be resting was when I usually happened upon her unannounced. You never had to call before dropping by Mawmaw’s house. I know she had to get sick of people constantly traipsing in her house at whatever hour but she never complained. (Do you see a theme?) She would be resting on the bed, reading or napping, and I would sit down in her empty wheelchair that sat beside her bed. We would have conversations about various and sundry while I rolled all around the room backwards and forwards and sideways and even out the bedroom door into the hallway and kitchen. She would just raise her voice and keep on talking. She knew there was no way I could be still long enough to finish a sentence and I remember hitting the door frame of that bedroom door I don’t know HOW many times because I’d misjudged the angle but she never scolded me. She let me roll around in her wheelchair like it was my own personal car. She also let me raid her kitchen like any good grandmother allows. I knew where she kept the potato chips because I was just as nosy as her and had found them on a scouting mission one day. She told me not to tell anybody (because she had 18 grandchildren dropping in at any given moment). I didn’t tell a living soul.

She liked a house dress for every day wear, not one of those large tent things but a dress that zipped up and she liked pockets on it. If it didn’t have pockets, she wore an apron. There was always a kleenex in the right pocket and maybe bits of paper where she wrote things down and Juicy Fruit gum in the left pocket for the grandkids. I know this because she allowed us (the grandchildren) to climb up her as monkeys do trees and rifle through her pockets until we found the gum hidden in that pocket. She laughed at us the whole time our mothers were scolding us to stop climbing on her like that. When she laughed, her belly shook and it was one of my most favorite sights in the world. She laughed with abandon, fully and completely with her entire body.

Her house as not built for a woman in a wheelchair and she could not see into skillets and pots on the stove. She didn’t complain. (You shouldn’t be surprised by this point.) She cooked by sound. My mama was on the phone with her one day and she asked my mama what she was cooking. Mama told her she was frying chicken. Mawmaw said, “You may need to check it. It sounds like it’s done.” And it was.  She could cook like nobody’s business and canned pickles and all the summer vegetables in her steaming hot kitchen from April until September. Her back was curved into a C near her neck so that when she did stand up, she was bent forward. The doorway to the bathroom was too small to accommodate her chair and she had to walk those few shuffling steps through that door everyday. Those few steps while holding onto the counter, wall, tub and back of the toilet are what the state used as evidence to say that she wasn’t really handicapped when she applied for a handicapped tag. My mama often took her grocery shopping because the car we owned was easy for her to get into and out of. Mom told her if she had a temporary tag, she could park her closer to the door and she wouldn’t have to work as hard while shopping. The state vetoed that idea. She didn’t complain.

In the early 1990’s, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She began taking chemo and radiation. All of her hair fell out and she began wearing turbans because she stayed cold all of the time. She ran fevers so high after the treatments, she would shake as if she were having a seizure. The port they put in her shoulder became infected and they figured out she was allergic to the dressing they were putting on it. She was too weak to feed herself and what she did eat didn’t stay down much. This is the only complaint we ever heard from her. “I wish I could feed myself.” She began living on ice cold watermelon straight from the fridge and frozen Ensures. It’s the only things her stomach would handle. After a few months of this, she flushed her pills and told her doctor, “Enough.” He said that her life expectancy would plummet. She replied, “What life?” He told her she had a few months to live without treatment. She proved the doctors wrong again by toughing it out for a year. She died in the hospital in January in 1994. The only reason she was in the hospital is because one of her sons noticed her grimace and asked her if she was hurting. She told the truth and admitted, “Yes,” so they took her to the hospital so they could make her more comfortable. She never complained.

Some people stare at people in wheelchairs. The sense of “other” scares them and the fact that they don’t know what happened makes them tactless and rude. Because I had a grandmother who I thought could do anything she wanted to do with no issues from a wheelchair, I don’t have that mindset. She gave me the gift of looking past a “handicap” and seeing a person, whole just as she was. Because she was whole, just as she was.

I am named after her and her mother. When my great aunt learned this at a cousin’s funeral, she looked me dead in the eye, was silent for a long while, and finally stated, “You have big shoes to fill.” I replied, “I know.”