Of llamas and grandmas and slot machines

When my grandmother died four years ago today most people were sympathetic, but also pragmatic.

Her death couldn’t have been that big a shock, they reasoned. After all, she was almost 93 years old.

But they were wrong.

Because what they failed to understand is that when someone lives as long as my grandmother did, as vibrantly as she did, you start to think that maybe, just maybe, they will live forever.

And in a way she will.

My grandmother, the way my grandmother led her life, left me with a legacy that strongly endures to this day: she taught me that aging is nothing to fear.

In fact she lived her life in a manner that actually has me eagerly anticipating my senior years. Thanks to her I can’t wait to reinvent myself after I retire from the world of work and child rearing.

I often prattle on to Rob about the possibilities inherent in the third act of our lives. What will we do? Go back to school, get geology degrees and teach seismology in Hawaii? Run a beachfront café in Panama? Teach English in Japan? Build homes in Africa? Raise horses? Llamas?

Thanks to my grandmother, there is no question in my mind that all of these things, and more, are possible.

My grandmother stuck close to home and raised her children until my grandfather died. She was 67. She then embarked on the next chapter of her life: the one in which she, along with her older (!) sister, my Aunt Verna, would travel.

And did they travel!

Damn her age, my grandmother was determined to see the world. She visited Europe, South America, Asia, Australia, the South Pacific and North Africa. One of my favorite pictures ever is of her and Aunt Verna, well into their 80s, posing at the Great Wall of China, shocks of white hair blowing in the wind.

She developed a tart tongue and a taste for slot machines. She was up for anything. She was 91 when one night I was visiting my mother and the two of us decided to make a midnight run to a casino an hour’s drive away. Just for fun we swung by grandma’s and rung the doorbell.

I remember her look of bewilderment as she answered the door in her nightdress, her hair in disarray.

“Come on Grandma! We’re going gambling!”

And she just nodded. “I’ll get my coat.”

My mom and I took my grandmother to Las Vegas for her 90th birthday. On the morning of our departure we woke at 4 a.m. to catch our plane out of Toronto. We landed in Vegas mid morning and grandma went right from the airport to the casinos where she whooped it up until 1 a.m.

She was touring Belize at 92 years of age just months before she died. And she’s in my heart still.

Grandma’s curiosity, her sense of adventure and her utter fearlessness will never leave me, no matter how much I continue to miss her today, and always.