An Opening Day Unlike Any Other

Grandma at the 1959 Carthage Fair

Opening day of the Hamilton County Fair became extremely important once I started competing in 1969 and increased as other members of my family participated, especially my mother. It was important to get over to the fairgrounds and see how our entries had done. Over the years, it became a tradition, a ritual, kind of like Christmas Eve. Sometimes those opening days were celebratory, with prizes to relish, sometimes dour because of disappointments and frustrations. Even when we all had stopped competing at the fair, we still went on opening day if possible. It was tradition.

The opening day of 1991 was unlike any other. That day, July 31, my maternal grandmother, Grandma Martha, passed away of complications of breast cancer.

It wasn't sudden. In fact, Mom and I had thought Grandma was in her last hours the previous Sunday evening--so much so that we stayed overnight, keeping company with the hospice nurse. Come morning, though, Grandma was still hanging on. By Tuesday evening, Grandma was in the hospice center of the local hospital. Mom and I went to see her. She'd been unable to talk all weekend. She stared into the distance, trance-like, occasionally reaching her hands toward someone or something. The hospice literature had said to expect such behavior.

That Tuesday evening, though, she wasn't moving at all. Before we left, I spent a few seconds alone with her. I told her this had to stop, it was time for her to move on. I was going to kiss her good-bye just as I had always kissed her good-bye, I would think of her every day for the rest of my life, and I would take good care of Mom. I kissed her, and departed.

Next morning Mom phoned me early. Grandma had passed within the previous hour. I felt almost relieved. Mom said she'd been talking, a kind of praying, to family members who had passed before: "Come and get her." My aunt had taken over funeral preparations, so there wasn't anything for us to do except deal with our grief. I went on to work.

I don't know if we even discussed still going to the fair, but I was going. If ever I needed a tradition rooted in family, it was then. The truth was, Grandma hadn't been fond of the fair, but she had accompanied us often in the early years of my childhood, and later when my sister was a baby. All those memories were tumbled together, and I had to dip into them. Later Mom must have phoned me at work and said she still wanted to meet at the fairgrounds.

Yes, it was excruciating. For not having any fondness for the fair, Grandma was everywhere, as was Grandpa, of course. We went in the little barn full of baby animals, and I remembered my sister looking around at Grandma, thinking she was making those animal sounds just as she did when she read their storybook. I thought of Grandma's pride in the exhibition hall when I'd won my first ribbon. I remembered her down in Grandpa's barn, laughing when my brother and cousin arrived, my brother with a big stuffed snake around his neck that our cousin had won for him. I was in a daze of pain, but hurting was a miniscule price for such treasured memories.

I've never thought my final words to Grandma did the trick. I think she was waiting until she could be truly alone to die on her own terms, with no deathbed scenes. She was private that way about certain things. She tolerated extreme emotion out of me, but much less out of others. During the previous month, she ordered my mother, "Don't you dare cry."

I've always wondered, though, if Grandma--if such things are possible--had held on to die the morning of the fair so we'd always associate her with that shining day in our personal calendar. Surely she knew she'd never be forgotten, but dying on opening day of the fair was one way to guarantee it. It's worked. Although I think of her on July 31, I relate her death more to that first (now usually only) visit to the Hamilton County Fair, even though opening day is now a couple of weeks later.

In those last weeks when Grandma was dying, I kept trying to remember a song from a decade earlier. I didn't know who'd sung it, and the only words I remembered was something about "old Mrs. [someone] died today" and "I'm remembering." I knew it was about a grandmother dying, and it haunted me when it was popular on country radio. I listened to the country station again in July 1991, hoping somehow they'd play it as an oldie. They never did; but thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I tracked down the song just a couple of years ago. This one's for you, Grandma: