monsterjoe

Monday morning my grandmother felt well enough to come out of her room and visit with me.

We sat in a little add-on room to her trailer and smoked and talked. My grandma is 77 years old and she's got really bad arthritis. She is in pain pretty much all the time. She's had both of her knees replaced and one of her hips. She's been diagnosed twice with lung cancer. The doctors were able to surgically remove them both. She now has a cancer near her liver and gall-bladder that makes her sick to her stomach. The doctors will not operate. They say that she wouldn't survive the surgery.

So we are sitting in this little room smoking and talking about biscuits and fried chicken and the light coming from the window just behind her cast a shine on her hair and gave substance to the wisps of smoke. Grandma had her eyes closed and had her chin proped up on the hand with her smoke. She was in her blue pajamas with a robe on and as I sat that looking at her I was overcome by how beautiful she was and how much I love her. There is a quote by some one (Elenor Roosevelt?) that says "beautiful young people are an accident of nature, but beautiful old people are a work of art." To me that quote could not be more exacting. She is the beauty of tragedy and joy and memory and pain and triumph. Every human emotion is written in her face and is captured there in a way that only the masters could duplicate, but never all of them together.

My grandmother is beautiful in a way that the SG's can't be, not for years and years.