Sad Days

I am in Dallas mourning the loss of my Grandma who died on Friday the 10th of November. Hers was a long deterioration from vibrant soul, to lost child in about a year. I last saw her in the Spring of 2005 and she was beginning to lose her short term memory, but had a remarkably easy time reminiscing about the war (that would be WWII). We lay in her bed one day, just before a nap, talking about all the boys who came home needing surgery and how she would sneak out for a smoke in the midst of 16 hour days of non-stop surgical procedures. I think she was most at home taking care of people... She certainly never forgot that she was a nurse. Even in the final days as she was moved from the hospital to a nursing home, she introduced herself, "I'm Edna Kamm, and I am an RN." After which she began planning a surgical schedule for patients only she knew about. But in the depths of her dementia, she was a nurse and it is that role that kept her alive through the loss of her eldest daughter, Nancy. And it was that role that made her life a living hell through the painful years of my Grandfather's emphysema. She never waivered, however.

My maternal grandparents adopted me when my mother and then my step-father died. I was 5 years old. Kamma, my elder sister was 8, my younger sister, Hollie a newborn. Hollie went to live with her father's parents, and Kamma and I went to stay with Grandma and Grandpa Kamm. We lived in a trailer park in Farmington, New Mexico. Papaw was a pipefitter for Bechtel Corp and worked on the power plant in Shiprock and then on the dam near Page, Arizona until he was diagnosed with Emphysema and we moved to Southern Colorado where he had hunted elk in the winters.