Oh just skip this.

This is the first time where I'm deliberately making a personal post. Please feel free to skip, I fear it may turn into a pity party and I'm not really into that.

I was talking to my mom today about my grandmother, her mother. She's the last living grandparent I have. She's going to turn 89 I believe, on Monday.

Eighty-nine. She's always been there. My earliest memories are a lot to do with her. She's been there through my high school, university, working years to now, she's been there for me during breakups and bad turns. She used to play dress up with me when I was 4 or 5. I developed an unreasonable love of the colour pink. She used to try to convince me there was a little fairy living in her juniper bushes named Elsie Bullrush. She'd make peanut butter sandwiches rolled up and cut into cute shapes and tell me Elsie made them for me.  She used to chase my brother and I around her house. She'd babysit us at our house and let us stay up until Mom and Dad came home (she made sure we were in bed before they walked in the house for fear they'd find out) When I was a teenager she used to try to crack through my sullen goth non comittal-ist glassy stare and try to relate to me by dancing the jitterbug, which had a high following back when she was my age. I stayed overnight at her house well into my late teens. We used to play cards and games, we'd have so many laughs. I didn't want night time to come.

She would tell me all about when she was little, she made it so it felt like I was there, that I knew all the other little girls she used to play with. She'd describe Woodroffe (as the area was known back then, it's rather close to Westboro) back when it was mostly farmland and her sister would hop from log to log on the river when it was a logging corridor. Reeny (Irene), Einie (Eileen), someone had an Aunt Isa, Olga MacLaren...she named off her entire neighbourhood like it was yesterday. Her family was the first on their street to own a car. She would describe her friend's older sister who was a flapper and cut the buttons off her coat so she'd hold it closed (flapper fashion, apparently). She described working for the government in a war department that obviously no longer exists and how she worked with a bunch of pervy old men who always tried to get her to well...it's not like she'd come right out and say what.

We don't have that much living history of the 1920's anymore. Our elderly are fading away and now it's more common that the oldest ones were born in the 30s. I read that Manitoba's oldest person recently died and she was born in 1899. So if anyone's left in the world who was born in the 1800's, they are at least 112.

Even more depressing is that my own mother is around the same age as Nanny was when I was born. So then I think of Rayna or Seth sitting there blogging 30 years from now about my own mom. Ah the cycle of aging and now it finally hits me. I guess I have a bit of a twisted Peter Pan complex, I don't want the world around me to age. I don't want to lose Nanny, I don't want my parents to get old and pass away. My mom and I both work at Health Canada. In 30 years time I'll be retiring and remembering how I worked with my mom and she had the mental capacity for it. The most sobering realization came when Nanny's younger sister died last year. The three sisters are down to two and I'm not sure about the health of my living  great aunt.

Anyway it looks as though Nanny is going downhill. Where she used to be a little bit on the worry wart side, she is now full blown panicky and forgetful. She's going to have to live in a home and at that point, it's going to be game over. And I'm feeling guilty because whenever I do see her, I don't know how to talk to her anymore because she's spooked me a few times with the words of someone who thinks I'm someone else. I don't know how present she is. I'm really thinking that I need to go over to her apartment and find out for myself and reconcile myself to it and to express my feelings of undying love to her while she still is cognizant for it. I am so lucky to have had her for this long. No one can ever know how much she has meant to me throughout my life and what a treasure she is. I guess she passed on to me her gift of telling the story, and I hope my mom remembers a lot of her childhood to pass on to my kids.

Joan Elizabeth Warnock Hobin Dale, you are reaching the very twilight and I'm trying to keep you awake so you'll stay up with me. I don't want night time to come.

I'm calling Nanny this weekend and I'm going to her.