Evaluating the Upline

And feeling lonely without them

First of all, congratulations! I have two Substack blogs: one for Crossroads and then this one. It is challenging (for me) to tell the difference between the two and I need to get better at that. As a result, you all got the one I intended for Crossroads and those of you who are lucky and wise enough to follow both blogs will receive that one twice. Sorry ‘bout dat.

It is only 1:30 in the afternoon and rest assured, that is not the only error I have made today.

I am convinced that the whole purpose of aging is to force a person to find an accord with their own fallibility. At least it is based on the ongoing evidence I am seeing.

Anyway, that person in the photo at the top of this post is my Granny, Mary Frances Mitchell (1909-1999). She was truly one of the finest people to ever live and certainly the kindest one I have ever known in my life. I would give anything to talk with her now.

When I was younger, Granny seemed sooooo oooold. Granted, she had many children (nine, if I am counting right) and some of those were born when she was in her late 30s. I remember when I got married in 1978, she would say she was “plenty-nine years old.” When I was sixteen, she was sixty-eight and yes, I supposed to me at that age, it qualified as ancient and now here I am only five years away from that.

This is my daddy and his parents. You can see that mirth and joy were not in abundance in that family tree, in contrast to the big grin on Granny’s face. Dad died when he was 51 in 1986. Both of his parents outlived him. Pappaw died in 1995 at age 90. Grandma died in 2003 about a week before she turned 87.

They also seemed so very old.

Mom died at age 60 in 2003. I am shaped almost exactly like she is in this photo and I am almost as silly as she was. This is Mom with Granny in 1979.

I don’t know much about how my father’s parents were in their final years because he was gone and they did not have much to do with the family after he died. My Granny had dementia for a few years before she died and like everyone else, I hope that is also my fate.

Granny’s husband, Pa, died early in 1967 at 56 from emphysema and black lung disease.

This gives me a mixed heritage of possibilities. Three out of four grandparents lived to be what most people would consider a ripe old age. One died prematurely from rolling his own Half and Half cigarettes and working long hours in a coal mine. My parents, however died young. Both of them had stressful lives and neither of them did much to take care of their physical bodies.

Pa was lean and weathered and looked older than his age. This photo was in 1960 and he would have been approximately fifty years old.

For the last halves of their lives, all of my other grandparents and my parents were obese. Our family comes from strong, sturdy peasant stock and we know how to old onto every calorie in case there aren’t many more coming for a while. Those kinds of bodies simply do not fare well in times of empty calories and desk jobs, none of which anyone in my upline ever experienced.

Me at 16 on Guam

I left home at sixteen-years-old and after that, seldom had the ability to go back to Kentucky where I was raised. I married a military man and our first duty station was on Guam. We were poor as church mice and flying back to Kentucky was an impossible dream. I saw my parents and my three remaining grandparents maybe five or six times after that before they died.

It seemed like we always lived so far away in California or New Mexico or the UK and we never had enough money to even get by, much less flourish enough that we could visit home. That was despite me working outside the home as well as having his active duty pay.

I never got to ask the questions to get information that would be so valuable to me now. For that matter, I would not have known what to ask back then. I did not pay much attention to their medical issues. Some, I never heard about. Most, I disregarded when I did hear about them, never imagining how important that information might one day be. My mother was in and out of the hospital and doctor’s office so often that it was hard to keep track of what was her “spastic colon” and what was her bad thyroid and what was even going on with her uterus that caused her to have a hysterectomy when she was only twenty-six and what the doctors said about her lemon-sized brain tumor she had removed in her late 40s and what was a result of her fears and speculations and embellishments made into facts.

The loneliness of having no upline left is a pain that has not lessened over the years. When I hear of people my age whose parents are still living, I am mesmerized. In my family, when you leave home, they mourn you as if you were dead and for good reason: you are then well and truly on your own. It is not as though any of my grandparents or my own parents did anything to support me after I left. They were loving and I appreciate it, but in practical application, I was already alone. They were not a safety net where I could fall if I failed and that was just the way of it.

When I did come home, it was as if I truly had died and then wandered out of the cemetery and into their homes years later. They had no clue how to relate to me or what to do with me when I was there. Because they were so disconnected from my life, they were noticeably antsy and anxious as I began to mature and they recognized that they knew very little about me despite our phone conversations and letters.

How I would love to correct that now. It would be so precious to get to know from an adult perspective rather than as I saw them at age sixteen or twenty or twenty-five. I want to ask my mother what happened the night she met my dad and what school was like for her. I want to know how she made do raising a family in greater poverty than I did. I want to know what scared her and what made her laugh and what her goals were in life.

I want to ask my Granny what her parents were like and what kind of house she lived in growing up. I want to know if it was scandalous that she was a year older than Pa was or if it really did not matter in her family and at that time. I want to ask her what it was like to be a schoolteacher at that point in Kentucky’s history.

Me with my family in 1986. We look as grim as my dad and his parents did in the other photo.

By getting married and leaving home at sixteen, I got used to being the youngest person in every group, at every job, and in every room. Now, it’s a miracle if I am not the oldest.

I like to believe that I infuse each day with gratitude for still being here, for being mobile, for having so few (known) health ailments, and for having a peaceful life. I want to think that I live each day to the fullest and do not long for the past or worry about the future.

I want to think that I have many hale and hearty years left to appreciate all that life brought to me, to pat myself on the back for surviving the tragedies that have come my way, and to persist and in making certain the people I love know how deeply I care for them.

I want to think that and I strive for that, but sometimes, I want to weep over how little time is likely left. I’m not done yet. I have so much more I want to see and feel and learn and accomplish in life and twenty or thirty years seems like not nearly enough time in which to do it all, especially if some of that time does not promise much quality of life.

I wish I had known back when that it would all pass so quickly. How I would love to pull aside that girl in the photos above and get her to breathe with me and be present in the moment and fully experience all that was happening around her instead of checking out for a good bit of the time. I wish I could tell her how precious all of this was, even the hardships, and that it’s over in what feels like the blink of an eye.

I mostly wish I could tell her I love her.