102 years

Today, I attended the funeral for my great-grandmother who was 102 years old.  As I only knew her in the later decades of her life I only knew her as a somewhat rough-edged individual.  From the stories I have heard she had always been blunt and capable of getting her hands dirty to the point of killing whatever needed to be killed with her hands or a shotgun on the farm, so I think elements of that personality were probably there when she was younger as well.

What has always struck me, and what I gave a lot of thought to this weekend, was how she essentially lived two lifetimes.

Her husband, and my great-grandfather, lost his first wife during childbirth.  So, she married him as his second wife as a teenager, and was eleven years his younger.  She had seven kids of her own plus his daughter from the previous marriage, and so she lived the life of a farm wife until her husband's death in 1962 when he was 63 and she was 52.  Their youngest son at the time was two days short of his thirteenth birthday.

I don't know too much about her life from the years immediately after her husband's death, but I do know that in the seventies she moved from the Midwest to Arizona with my grandparents to assist in missions work on the Navajo reservation in Arizona.  She was there over twenty years before coming back with them to Missouri where she lived another sixteen years.  Those years had to have been strikingly different from what she had lived up to that point in her life.

I can see how some of the segments of my own life are very different from others, but I have not even reached one third of the life that she has led.  When I think of life being short I think in terms of living seventy or eighty years.  At this stage of my life, one hundred years feels like more time than I would even want.  As she was married into her fifties then lived another fifty unattached, that had to feel like she was two different people.  That's how I believe I would feel in that same situation.

Coming full circle back to my grandmother's personality, it was very strong.  She had zero qualms telling anyone what she thought of whatever and whoever.  As a result, she was incredibly blunt.  She also did what needed to be done, at least when she was physically capable of it.  As she has a strong personality, it makes complete sense that she would establish her own way for the fifty years that she outlived my great-grandfather.

In any case, they are meeting up again now for the first time in literally decades.  That has to be joyous.