Nana

Dear Monkey,

I took you today to see your Nana. That's my mom. We saw her in Beckley, where your old man is from and close to Nana's house. We didn't go to her house, though. We went to a place called the Hospice house. We went there because your Nana is dying.

I really never imagined having to write this. I always thought you'd grow up knowing Nana and spending lots of time with her. In the one year you've been on this earth, she has loved you very much. You spent a few days with her just a week before she went into the hospital. She told me that you've brought enormous joy to her life. It causes me more pain than I really thought was imaginable to know that you will grow up without her.

Here's what's happened. Nana hasn't felt well since your Grandaddy died, about 10 months ago. She's a teacher. She's 75-years-old, way past the time most people retire from teaching, but she started the school year just the same as she has the last 25 or so. You see, Nana didn't start teaching school until she was 50. Anyway, she called me about a month ago to tell me that she was quitting. She was going to take a leave of absence for some minor medical problems and then retire.

That was on a Monday. That Thursday or Friday she went into her doctor for some tests. She told me that next Monday that she had to go to the emergency room because there were some irregularities in her blood. At the hospital, they discovered a growth on her liver and pancreas. It was something called pancreatic cancer.

I'm not as knowledgeable about medical science as a lot of people, but a cancer is a type of growth that sort of takes over your body. It wants to reproduce itself just like all living things do, and pancreatic cancer is really good at that. Unfortunately for us, it uses our bodies the same way we use food and land and all sorts of things to stay alive and grow.

Nana went to a lot of hospitals, but there wasn't much they could do for her. By the time you are her age, they may have found a way to fight that type of cancer more effectively. I sure hope so.

So I guess I'm writing this letter to you so that you will know and remember what your Nana was like after she is gone.

First of all, she is really beautiful. She's an old lady now, of course, but I remember when I was just three and four years old thinking my mother was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. She used to wear kind of bright red lipstick when she got dressed up and she put something called Oil of Olay on her skin every day. She never looked her age. Even looking at her now in her bed, she doesn't look 75. She had almost no gray hair till she was about 60, I think. She smiled a lot, too. I suppose if you remember anything about her, that will be it, because she always smiled when she saw you.

She is also really smart. She was voted "Most Studious" in high school (Man High School, Class of 1956) and she always read. When I think about the number of books she devoured, it's almost unreal. That was her real passion in life and it's something she passed along to me. She read everything, too. She read the Bible regularly, of course. She read history books and historical fiction. She liked novels, too. I remember her telling me that she read Song of the Lark by Willa Cather almost entirely by flashlight under her blanket when she was young. When I was a child she read trashy romance novels, but she gave that up eventually.

She loved learning, which I guess comes along with the love of reading. She'd gotten married when she was 17 and had to quit college when she got pregnant with your Uncle Don. But the entire time we were growing up she concerned herself more with our education than anything else, I think.

She took us to the library all the time. I remember once that the librarian at the Raleigh County Public Library refused to check out more than three books to me. Well, your Nana got so angry that she marched herself up to the desk and told that woman that unless there was some formal policy that applied to all library patrons that I was allowed to check out as many books as I wished.

She went back to college herself when she was 45. She got a degree in library science, because she thought she wanted to be a school librarian. She got her masters in special education with an emphasis on gifted education and became a gifted teacher instead.

She always talked to us like adults. This is something I remember from my earliest childhood, and I hope I have the good sense to do the same with you. She insisted on using an intelligent vocabulary and correct English grammar all of the time.

Oh, and she hated obscene language, which is really pretty funny considering she married Don Deskins. Once when I was in 8th grade, I was playing music with some friends at the Ghent Fair. Just as we were about to take the stage, I discovered that I'd left my sheet music at home, which was some 15 minutes away. I let loose repeating a single expletive ("shit") about 50 times in a row. I didn't know she was standing behind me. Oh, goodness. That was one of the few times I think your Grandaddy saved me from your Nana, instead of the other way around.

She and I happened to teach at the same school for a few years. It was called Beckley-Stratton Middle School and she taught gifted and I taught music. One time a group of students who had both of us in class told on me to her because I'd used the word "crap" in class. They told me that my mother said that was the sign of a limited vocabulary.

You know, when we worked and taught at that school those years, she ate lunch with me almost every single day. I say this because it wasn't like a chore for me. (I hope it wasn't for her.) It wasn't a case of feeling obligated to spend time with her because she was my mother. She was a really interesting person to talk to. She talked about politics and religion and education and the books she was reading.

She is a good cook, too. She grew up in that generation where the mother did all the cooking in the family and your Nana had to cook for five children, her husband, and herself. Every meal was a big meal. Her style was a blend of what I guess could be called traditional mountain cooking, 1950s housewifery, and experimental cuisine.

Sometimes we ate beans and cornbread; in fact, we ate cornbread almost every meal it seemed, and hers was the best. She made cornbread dressing for Thanksgiving, which is the best kind of dressing. But she also made really great lasagna, even though we aren't Italian. Every Christmas Eve, we ate fried fish, fried oysters, shrimp, and scallops. Potato soup, chili, chicken and dumplings, fried chicken, lima beans, deviled eggs, pork roast, peas, corn, mashed potatoes, cheeseburgers on grilled bread, homemade "pronto pups," hot dogs with her own chili, pepperoni rolls . . . it was all so good. And chicken chow mein, which while not tasting very Chinese still was very good. Oh, and cherry pie. I make cherry pie like she did, or at least I try.

You Nana is very devout, after her own fashion. She grew up a good Methodist but became a Baptist sometime after the family moved to Raleigh County. She went to church regularly for many years, without your Grandaddy. She was probably less regular in that as time went on, but she still read her Bible, read theology, and listened to preachers on TV. (Not the holy rollers, but the ones that had lots of notes with their sermons.) We always said "grace" before every meal, but I wanted to hear her pray: she sounded more sincere than everyone else.

That didn't mean she believed every thing she was told by preachers hook, line, and sinker. She didn't see anything wrong with rock and roll music, so we played it at home, in spite of what the preacher and the holy joes down at Daniels Missionary Baptist thought.

She played piano at the church, for the choir and for services. She loved to play hymns in the evening, too, and she made sure we all had music in our life. She had played soprano saxophone in the Man High School Band. (It was a Selmer they had bought used from "someone in New York City" for $125 in the early 1950s. It kind of makes me nuts to think what it might be worth if she had kept it.) She made sure we had piano lessons (and saxophone lessons and guitar lessons and flute lessons and voice lessons and anything else any of us ever wanted to do).

Nana and Grandaddy liked to listen to music a lot when I was younger. She liked a lot of Glen Miller and pop singers from the 1940s and 50s. I don't know what her favorite song was, unless it was "Too Young," by Nat "King" Cole. She and Grandaddy both sang that one a lot.

She thought a lot about the "extras" in life, things other parents might not bother with. Your Aunt Sarah and I took watercolor painting lessons for several years from Chris DellaMea's mom because Nana thought we should expand ourselves that way.

Nana did most of the day-to-day discipline at home, with Grandaddy brought in for the bigger jobs. If you got in trouble with her, she'd make you go cut your own switch in the woods. If she didn't like the one you brought back, she'd send one of your brothers or sisters to get one. You did not want that to happen.

Once she was whipping me for something in the kitchen and your Aunt Sandy Jo (who was an older teenager at the time) began laughing at my tears. You know what Nana did? She turned right around and whipped Sandy Jo, quite against her loud protests, for being so mean.

She had this kung fu move, too, that she used in the car. If you were sitting in the passenger seat while she was driving and you said something smart aleck, she'd flick the back of her hand lightning fast and smack you in the mouth without even looking. It was pretty impressive.

But really, she didn't spank us very much. In fact, she was the first to take your part against a teacher or bully at school, sometimes to a fault. I once called the gym teacher at school "stupid" (I wrote it actually) and she defended me because she thought he was. She'd never let the preacher or another parent or anyone correct us: that was her bailiwick.

She defended me against others clear on into my adulthood. I think her love for me sometimes blurred her realization of just how much I screwed up sometimes. As a grown-up I found myself confessing horrible sins to her, over the phone or sitting on her couch back in Daniels, only to have her assure me that what I did was perfectly understandable and no one should fault me for it. She thought I set the moon.

When I was about seven or eight-years-old, I got ahold of a book of poetry that belonged to Nana. It was called The Best Loved Poems of the American People. It had all kinds of stuff in it like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and "Song of Hiawatha," and it was divided into sections with titles like "Home," "Faith," and "Humor." I think one section was called "Family," and I read a bunch of those poems. A lot of it was maudlin stuff. There was one poem that I liked though, and I memorized it. It was really saccharine and sentimental and silly in a lot of ways, but it was sentiment I finally loved, I guess. The final stanza went:

My friends be yours a life of toil or undiluted joy,  

You can learn a wholesome lesson from this small, untutored boy.  

Don't aim to be an earthly saint with eyes fixed on a star,  

Just try to be the fellow that your mother thinks you are. 

I don't know how I'd ever live up to that, because she loved me, loved all of us, so unconditionally.

And she loves you, very, very much. She told me you were the prettiest baby she'd ever seen. (Don't tell your cousins.)

But now I sit here with you in this room and her in a bed just a few feet away, you at the start of this whole journey and she at the very end of hers. It makes my heart hurt. A lot. And it hurts even more when I think of your brother that she will never meet.

I'll tell you this monkey: it goes real fast. Before you turn your head, the ones you thought would be there forever are gone from you. Try to live your life with that knowledge. Love your own mother as much as I love mine, because yours is beautiful and brilliant, too. Read and learn about everything you can, and you will honor her memory. When you eat the cherry pie we make or a piece of cornbread, know that those are tastes that have been brought to you through generations. And sing your song, because you have a song for this world.

I love you very, very much.

Daddy