The New Visions Blog!⏳

Memorial Day issue 🕯️🙏🇺🇸☮️

I started writing this blog post in my notebook 📓 last week. I never do that. It's all freehand on my phone 📱.
I wrote about my late uncle who served in the Korean war. He never talked about it and I didn't know much about it until decades later.

I thought about my grandma Rose 🌹 and how in her last year of life ( 1967) we really got to know each other. Even though we lived in the same 4th-floor walk-up since I was born. I don't think she knew how much I loved her.

She had problems people didn't talk about in the 1960s. She spent time at the diner drinking coffee ☕. My grandpa Moe took me to many wonderful places like Yankees and Mets baseball games. We went to Coney Island and took day cruises up the Hudson River!
She never came. And didn't seem to have much use for me.

When I was 11 she got sick and I didn't know it was the C word.
(People didn't say the word Cancer out loud for the genuine fear that they could catch it, if they spoke that word...)
At that time we moved to another place in Brooklyn NY called Crown Heights.
She picked out a beautiful white with gold brocade couch and it had plastic covers on it.

One day I was 12 and walked into the bedroom. She looked at me with so much fear in her eyes and when I looked at her stomach, she was gluing a red rubber bag to it.
All at once I understood what a colostomy bag was for.

I smiled at her and said
" Grandma, can I please help you?"

She seemed surprised by my reaction to her plight and said

"No Diane but thank you."
She shyly smiled.

" Ok tell me if you do Grandma. I love you"

She answered

" I love you too "

She never said that to me before.

We walked our dog prince together ( usually she didn't want me to go with her but things changed that last year.

There's more to this story like hearing a voice telling me what time she would pass.

For now I must go the kitties need to be fed.

I'm wondering if I should go back to my last blog or forge ahead with this one.

Blessings 🙏 🕯️😻