Brash Blackberry #12
When I tell friends who met my grandmother before her death what she was really like, they’re usually surprised.
“Come on. There’s no way she said shit like that,” one friend told me when I told stories about the real her.
Sometimes at family functions, Grandma would tell her children and grandchildren stories of her past and we would all gather in a semi-circle, hoping to hear something we didn’t know. We made a rule that anyone 17 or older could hear the stories, as we liked to think of them as equivalent to R-rated films. They were usually graphic and full of obscenities, and only during the telling of these stories would she talk like this.
Grandma King was an artifact – she’d seen the world change and lived to tell of it. As a military nurse, she saw World War II up close and personal. She claimed to havegiven Clark Gable a hand job three years before his death. (She’d add on the end, “Of course, this was before I was married. But still, it was exhilarating.”) Grandma even survived a rapturous tornado that took the life of her husband and a few of her neighbors.
She was full of stories, but only one of her stories struck me on every emotional level. And to this day, that story defines her existence in my mind.
***
Mary awoke when the bombs started to drop. She’d fallen asleep in a hospital bed the night before, after treating a petty officer that had burned his hand trying to set a makeshift fire outside of his quarters.
As a 22-year-old nurse at Pearl Harbor, Mary never expected to hear the sounds she heard. Dazed, she stepped out of the hospital’s back door, greeted by the sight of mountainous pillars of black smoke. She looked overhead, seeing a swarm of Japanese fighter planes. The pilots dropped bombs and torpedoes at battleship row, the massive naval ships assigned to protect the Pacific.
Mary ran 1,000 feet from the hospital, not caring that a bullet or bomb could graze her. She needed to see what was happening at the bay. When she neared the edge of the shore, she saw a Japanese pilot land a bomb into the innards of the USS Arizona. Many officers on deck jumped ship in a desperate attempt to save their lives. Mary stood mesmerized at that moment, knowing that in just a few seconds the ship would explode from the inside out.
When it exploded, Mary got an expansive look at the gaping hole in the side of the Arizona. She saw a man hanging from the edge of the newly created hole, his torso impaled by a steel rod and flesh burned beyond repair. Mary threw up.
She had never seen anything like this before. Hell, she’d never even had a patient die in front of her. She had a feeling everything – her existence, the lives of everyone here, the world – was about to drastically change.
After the pilots were out of bombs, they began shooting machine gun ammunition into any American they could aim at. Mary immediately ran back to hospital with a clearer head than before.
When she came back, she was ordered by a doctor to begin allocating all available medical supplies and put them out on tables. And as she began prepping the spaces for the dead and dying, hundreds of wounded soldiers came through the front doors, with burns, gun shot wounds and the like.
***
She was changed. My guess is that when she looked into the abyss of that ship and saw death so close, she learned the fragility of her life. She no longer held onto the trivial things and in turn, her thoughts and actions were lived without remorse.
At her funeral, we blew up the last photo taken of her. It was taken at the Sheraton hotel lobby six hours after she visited the USS Arizona memorial in Honolulu. The photo shows Grandma wearing several leis, smoking a cigarette, and relaxing like she was telling one of her stories.
The night that photo was taken, the 87-year-old woman died in her hotel bed. It wasn’t the cigarettes, as many of us thought it might be. Her heart had just stopped beating.
Most of her family, myself included, came to the conclusion that Hawaii was the best place for her to pass away. She looked back at Pearl Harbor as the real beginning of her life and at the Arizona memorial, she decided it was finally okay if she didn’t continue on.
She had done her part.
“Come on. There’s no way she said shit like that,” one friend told me when I told stories about the real her.
Sometimes at family functions, Grandma would tell her children and grandchildren stories of her past and we would all gather in a semi-circle, hoping to hear something we didn’t know. We made a rule that anyone 17 or older could hear the stories, as we liked to think of them as equivalent to R-rated films. They were usually graphic and full of obscenities, and only during the telling of these stories would she talk like this.
Grandma King was an artifact – she’d seen the world change and lived to tell of it. As a military nurse, she saw World War II up close and personal. She claimed to havegiven Clark Gable a hand job three years before his death. (She’d add on the end, “Of course, this was before I was married. But still, it was exhilarating.”) Grandma even survived a rapturous tornado that took the life of her husband and a few of her neighbors.
She was full of stories, but only one of her stories struck me on every emotional level. And to this day, that story defines her existence in my mind.
***
Mary awoke when the bombs started to drop. She’d fallen asleep in a hospital bed the night before, after treating a petty officer that had burned his hand trying to set a makeshift fire outside of his quarters.
As a 22-year-old nurse at Pearl Harbor, Mary never expected to hear the sounds she heard. Dazed, she stepped out of the hospital’s back door, greeted by the sight of mountainous pillars of black smoke. She looked overhead, seeing a swarm of Japanese fighter planes. The pilots dropped bombs and torpedoes at battleship row, the massive naval ships assigned to protect the Pacific.
Mary ran 1,000 feet from the hospital, not caring that a bullet or bomb could graze her. She needed to see what was happening at the bay. When she neared the edge of the shore, she saw a Japanese pilot land a bomb into the innards of the USS Arizona. Many officers on deck jumped ship in a desperate attempt to save their lives. Mary stood mesmerized at that moment, knowing that in just a few seconds the ship would explode from the inside out.
When it exploded, Mary got an expansive look at the gaping hole in the side of the Arizona. She saw a man hanging from the edge of the newly created hole, his torso impaled by a steel rod and flesh burned beyond repair. Mary threw up.
She had never seen anything like this before. Hell, she’d never even had a patient die in front of her. She had a feeling everything – her existence, the lives of everyone here, the world – was about to drastically change.
After the pilots were out of bombs, they began shooting machine gun ammunition into any American they could aim at. Mary immediately ran back to hospital with a clearer head than before.
When she came back, she was ordered by a doctor to begin allocating all available medical supplies and put them out on tables. And as she began prepping the spaces for the dead and dying, hundreds of wounded soldiers came through the front doors, with burns, gun shot wounds and the like.
***
She was changed. My guess is that when she looked into the abyss of that ship and saw death so close, she learned the fragility of her life. She no longer held onto the trivial things and in turn, her thoughts and actions were lived without remorse.
At her funeral, we blew up the last photo taken of her. It was taken at the Sheraton hotel lobby six hours after she visited the USS Arizona memorial in Honolulu. The photo shows Grandma wearing several leis, smoking a cigarette, and relaxing like she was telling one of her stories.
The night that photo was taken, the 87-year-old woman died in her hotel bed. It wasn’t the cigarettes, as many of us thought it might be. Her heart had just stopped beating.
Most of her family, myself included, came to the conclusion that Hawaii was the best place for her to pass away. She looked back at Pearl Harbor as the real beginning of her life and at the Arizona memorial, she decided it was finally okay if she didn’t continue on.
She had done her part.
posted by Anonymous at 11:13 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home