One hundred five and more

And so the era ends. My great grandma, Clara Jackson, died Friday morning at the age of 105.5. Or, more specifically, one hundred five years, eight months, and one day. March 26, 1904 - November 27, 2009.

You can see her and read more about her here. As well as her obituary.

Ever since she turned 100, since she moved in with her son and daughter-in-law (my grandparents), since I moved away and began the tradition of only returning to Hutchinson four or five times a year, I have been considering every visit with her my last. I would hug her, kiss her on the cheek, and let her know how pretty she looked in her purple shirt. Her short-term memory got worse in the last few years, but she would reminisce about her childhood, her children's youth, and her 70+ years of marriage like it was the day before.

I have been reminiscing, too, over the last couple of weeks. We were pals, me and great grandma, particularly when I was young. She babysat me. We did calisthenics in the living room. She helped me build a fort out of blankets and chairs. She let me eat a whole bag of marshmallows. She let me help her make her famous cinnamon rolls. She let me stand on the floor heater to warm my feet. She taught me to sew. She let me go through her jewelry. She let me start her car and back it out of the garage before I was old enough to drive. She brought cinnamon rolls to my class on my 12th birthday. She went to the 4th of July parade with us, sat in a lawn chair on Main Street, and then treated us to Church's chicken afterward. We helped her decorate graves with fresh peonies from her backyard on Memorial Day. I mowed her yard in patterns, in diagonals, in squares, in rows, in a heart once.

She spent her last week in Hospice in Hutchinson. I didn't see her again. She kept saying, "I should have died yesterday." She wanted to go. She has wanted to go for some time.

It snowed on my thirteenth birthday, in the middle of April. It was nearly a blizzard. I was having a slumber party at Great Grandma's house. After a series of pyramid photo shoots, one girl on top of the other with Elmo or teddy bear in joyful hand, we settled down in my great grandfather's former bedroom. The furniture was solid. The bed was a queen. It was low to the ground, headboardless. In a drunken exhaustion from the laughing, we collapsed in sleeping bags on the bed. I reach up to turn off the overhead light but nothing happened. I tried it again. It didn't work. I went across the room and flipped another switch. Lights off. We slept. We shivered. Through the open door, the woman in a slip and bra, peach satin. I looked up at her, ghostly in the dark cold. She flipped the switch back down. It was the heater, she told us in the morning, stern. We shouldn't have touched it. We had turned off the heater and were shivering.