“Just because you have pains, doesn’t mean you have to be one.”
My mother’s mother, the original Catherine Durkin, was a remarkable woman. For nine grandchildren, she’ll always be “Nana”, but friends and family affectionately called her “Kitty”.
Every winter for seventeen years, Kitty came to Florida and lived with us. A healthy family grows on each other when everyone is in the same house, talking, listening for that length of time. It makes for beautiful memories.
My brother, sister, and I will never walk by a cosmetics counter and not recall the woman who insisted on
Clinique because “Oil of Olay puts hair on your face.” Through our Nana, we discovered miracles of
Lestoil, appreciation for Westerns, and, especially, how to grow old with dignity and humor.
In other words, the woman ruined us. As a result, Michele, Michael, and I have no sympathy for anyone who brings down a room with moans and groans. No sympathy at all.
According to medical records, Nana suffered from
macular degeneration, congestive heart failure, severe arthritis and a million other ailments. I say “medical records” because she never talked about her problems. Not once. If you asked about her health, she’d always say, “Fine.” She believed it, too. And so she was fine. That’s how it worked.
Nothing slowed her down, either. We lived in a little house off a busy street she would walk every day because McDonald’s coffee was the only kind she liked. Didn’t matter that she was blind. Once the police stopped her because an elderly person had escaped a local nursing home and Nana fit the description. She giggled while allaying the officer’s fears and finally convinced him to let her go about her business. She shopped at the Dollar Store and socialized with clerks at Albertson’s before making her way back home.
We’d lecture about the dangers of a blind woman with fragile bones walking along a highway, but she’d tell us to “be the hush”. Eventually we’d give up, smile, and admire her some more. She loved being around young people – entertaining our friends, partying at
O’Brien’s for St. Patrick’s Day and digging our music. During my heavy metal phase, Nana would rock out to Whitesnake. Can you imagine an octogenarian lip-synching
“Slide It In” while folding laundry?
Florida’s beautiful weather and my mother’s kindness drew northern visitors and certain relatives got on our collective nerves. Not Nana. She never invoked anything other than delight with her presence. Kitty’s secret is a mystery to me still, but I wish more people possessed it. She was tough, opinionated, and saucy. And we loved every minute we were blessed enough to share with her. When she left us all on a cool September day back in 1998, no one wanted her to go. But she was ready. And I remember thinking that’s what happens – the end of a long life lived well is embraced because another adventure awaits.
My mother has inherited those same traits as she enters her own senior-discount years. My sons will learn from her ability to laugh through aches and pains, dwelling instead on the blessing behind watching grandchildren grow up. Aren’t toughies a dying breed, though? People who aren’t suffering nearly as much use old age as an excuse to die instead of live. I grow frustrated and brag about my Nana. I tell stories and relish the life of a woman who never gave in to self-pity and remained independent for eighty-nine years.
I’d like to tell people both young and old, “Quit complaining and get moving!” That’s what Kitty would have said. That’s what Kitty did.
