Goodbye and Mothers Day

The speaker reflects on the recent loss of their last grandparent and the passing of a generation. They discuss their upbringing and close relationships with extended family members. They express sadness at the lack of family reunions and the disinterest of younger generations in preserving family heirlooms and traditions. They emphasize the importance of family and passing down stories and history. Welcome back to Devilish Angel Productions. I'm Christy, your host, and today it's just me. I'm sitting here reflecting on my weekend, and this one's going to be a hard one. Basically, it's about saying goodbye to a generation. We, as a family, came together this weekend in the war land at Maui and said goodbye to my grandfather. He was the last grandparent for me to lose as an adult. I have to say, I am so grateful and fortunate to be in my 50s and just now losing my last grandparent. Growing up, I lost my great-grandmother, so my grandfather's grandmother, when I was 20. I really enjoyed having that, having all those grandparents, because not everybody does. Sometimes I think that we take for granted the people that are in our lives. We did. We had a good group, a good turnout, even though it was raining in Oregon. We had people that traveled quite a distance, including myself. I spent literally the last two days visiting with my cousin's extended family. I was like my cousin Mark from the Bend area. I hadn't seen him, I think, since my great-grandfather's service. That was back, I think I was a senior in high school. I think that was the last time I had seen him. We talked about some childhood things. You look around the room and you look at pictures. One of my cousins, his son, who is, I think he's in kindergarten or first grade, I think he's in first grade. He looks just like my grandfather that just passed away. We were talking about how strong the genetics are. It was good, good food. But then just spending the whole weekend visiting and just knowing that that whole generation is gone now. I guess I'm sad. I'm sad because they're the ones that raised me. My grandparents grew up in a really small community. It was a logging community. If you weren't in the driving truck, you're in the mill. All the people that you went to school with, even though you weren't blood-related, you were family. I had people that I wasn't really related to, but they were my aunts and uncles. My grandparents, they had a group of people that they grew up with that they called the pooped group. They would go to Reno and they would go on cruises and dinners. They had the sweatshirts and everything that said it. Slowly, over the years, we've watched them all pass away. But them and their kids, my cousins, my first cousins, or actually it would be my mom's cousins, helped raise me and babysit me, teach me to read. I spent a lot of time with these people. Just walking around the cemetery and seeing the names. There's still a few that are still there, still here. A perfect example, I did go see an aunt and uncle that I spent a lot of time with. I spent a lot of time with their girls. I hadn't seen them in a while, since I think my grandmother passed away, I think it was six years ago. I had no idea how bad their health had gotten. I was shell-shocked to see these people that were so strong and wise and everything. Now they're not mobile. They have difficulty speaking and making full sentences due to strokes, or health things that have happened. I have to remember, I have to keep reminding myself, I'm in my 50s. I'm not a kid anymore. That one hit me hard, too. Again, it was so good to see some of my cousins. I have to say that I'm very happy for Facebook and social media, because that is where we have stayed in contact. We don't all live close together, like my grandparents' generation. We don't all live on the family land, or on the same street, or in the same town, or the town next to you. My generation isn't like that. I am one of the few in the family that did move out of the state. Then I actually have another cousin that is only 45 minutes away from me. We stay in contact, and we see each other and stuff. There's a few of us that have moved away, but it seems like the only time we come together is for a service, or a 90th birthday party, like for my grandfather last year, before he passed. It saddens me that people don't do the family reunions. They don't get together and have the family dinners. We would all get together for Easter. In fact, my aunt, who is two years older than me, so we're more like sisters, she had mentioned how we used to go to the church for Easter, when we were kids and all of that, and we used to come together and do that. I know that when I moved away to Washington, I tried to keep that value. I hauled my kids, and we have conversations about that all the time, how I used to haul them three and a half hours or three hours back down to Oregon for birthdays and holidays and everything. It was because I was trying to keep that family value and importance and instill in them. I think I missed the mark a bit there, but I tried. I did, I tried. I'm going to miss that generation. They taught me a lot. I have friends that say that I'm pretty frugal, and my kids have said that for them growing up, I could whip up a meal with what they thought was nothing in the house. But those are things that I was taught by those people, that generation. My grandmother was the oldest of seven, and she always tells the story about they were so poor that she didn't have a crib or anything. She started out in a dresser drawer. When growing up, they canned everything. They freezed everything. They planted gardens, all of the basics, because they didn't have the money. You had to make things from what you had. You had to preserve stuff, and those are great skills that I know how to do. I remember when COVID started, and my daughter, we went to my mom's to visit for Mother's Day, I think it was, and we were making some masks out of some material. I just went over to the sewing machine and started sewing. My daughter goes, you know how to sew? I didn't know you knew how to sew. I go, yeah, but I used to learn. I learned how to sew on the old Singer foot pedal with a belt, which is still at my mother's house, which was my great-great-grandmother's. That's how I learned on those machines, or I did it by hand. She was surprised that I knew how to do that. I'm like, there's a lot of skills or things that I know. I know how to can. I know how to do these things. I know that when I'm with my friends, they always joke that if there's a disaster or a zombie apocalypse or whatever, that they want me on their team because apparently they feel that I know how to do everything as far as survival and all those things. I can appreciate that. I do. That makes me smile. But I learned them from somewhere. My grandfather taught us how to cut wood and split wood and stack wood because he had all girls until my brother and my cousin Michael came around, which they're on the tail end of everything. I was the first granddaughter of everything. We were out there handing them the tools and things. Same thing on my father's side. My father was the oldest of three boys. Again, I was the first grandkid and the girl, and I had to learn things. They just figured, hey, we're just going to teach her. It's kind of a shock of them being gone. I stopped and visited with one of my cousins on the way home. We were talking, and she was showing me around the house of all the things like our great-grandmothers or in her and her husband's family and things that had been passed down and all that stuff. I was like, yeah, because my kids, I asked them constantly, is there anything you want? Do you want me to keep this? They're not interested in the old family photos. They're not interested in pieces of jewelry that have been in the family for years. My mother has all of her, again, my great-great-grandmother's belongings. She has all of the generation's belongings. She has the old rocking chair and all of the old black and white pictures and all of these things. It's like, who's going to take those items and things and who wants those in our family after she's gone? Because we all have our own different decor now. We don't hang on to the antiques like they did in my grandparents' or my mother's generation. I'm Gen X. So what do we do with those things? How do we preserve our past and our history? Those are my questions. How do we do that? Family marriages really just don't have that interest or that desire anymore. Our traditions are kind of out the door as well. My kids don't really know their cousins as much as I tried. They just don't. They don't have those connections like I did growing up. Because I know where I live, we've inherited this property from Tony's family. I've been trying to keep the things that we come across on the property and to put them back into decor or something like that, some of that history that was his grandfather's, whether it's the items from the horse stall or his figurines of the eagles or old chairs. I'm still trying to keep things because this was his place and I want to honor that. What do you guys do? What do you do with family heirlooms, so to speak, that are being passed down from generation to generation? I know that recently I've had more connection with my cousin Tyler on the other side of the family, my dad's side. He lost his dad almost two years ago. He had given me an ashtray that had an engraving on it that was our grandfather's. He never met our grandfather. So when we got together, I handed it off to him. There's some things that I feel that I can pass down. Again, it's just sad. It's sad that that generation is gone. They taught me so much. I hope that we, the Generation X, continues that tradition of passing things down and stories and history. I think it's important that we know where did we come from? What were our families like? Especially nowadays when we have the whole genetic DNA stuff, which that's a whole different topic too. I guess it's just a different thought, sharing. Think about that. Think about your kids. Think about your family members and how connected are you with them? Because family is important. I've always felt that. Family is important. I don't know where I'd be without my family, my cousins, my grandparents, my aunts, uncles. I've always felt that it's important to stay in contact with all of them. I just wanted to share that. I just wanted to share. Hug your grandparents if you still have them. Hug your parents if you still have them. Tomorrow's not guaranteed. Everybody's getting older. They're not always going to be here. Thank those people that have met something to you, have taught you something, especially with Mother's Day coming up. Be grateful. Be grateful that you have a relationship, even though it's maybe a shitty relationship. But they brought you into this world. And they did their best based off of what they knew. And that's all I can say. Just have a good Mother's Day with your mothers, your grandparents, people that are a mother figure in your life, because they're all teaching you something that you'll hang on to forever. They're not always going to be here. So with that, have a good one. And I hope you enjoyed my rambling. Have a good Mother's Day coming up, all right? And again, just appreciate your family. Love your family, because nobody's perfect, including you. Have a good one.