Alabama

Tomorrow morning when the sun is not yet seen my husband will drop my daughter and I off at Portland International airport.  By day's end, we ought to be in the southern region of the United States. Specifically, we ought to be walking the ground of Montgomery, Alabama.

My nearly 97-year old grandmother, affectionately known as Mimi, passed away a few days ago. My mother has told my sister and I that when this day would come that we must pack our bags and head south to hold her hand and help her bury her mother. My sister and I grew up in the west so we have only a handful of memories of our mother's mother. We've been to Alabama only a few times and have met on such occasions relatives and cousins from my mother's side of the family.

When the news came that Mimi had breathed her last, I asked my children if they wanted to go help pay their respect. My son, nearly 14, predictably said, "I'm sorry she's passed, but it's ok. I'd rather stay home." He hasn't a single memory to hang on to of her so I did not press it. Besides, the last thing I want is to be couped up in a hotel room with a scowling adolescent boy who just doesn't see the value in sitting around the kitchen table and swapping stories.

Rose, my nearly 17-year old daughter is a different story. She has a couple of memories of Mimi, but more importantly, Rose chose to study Mimi's life for an ancestry project when she was in the 8th grade. Rose connected to Mimi then as she gleaned as much as she could about her great-grandmother from talking at length with my mom. Even then, Mimi's mind had begun to ebb so Rose had to rely on my mom for family history and lore.

It has been fifteen years since I was last in Alabama. It will be like a homecoming, of sorts. My early childhood was spent in nearby Louisiana. I lived in Alexandria until I was ten, long enough for sweet tea to run in my veins. To this day, if I get very tired or take Sudafed I will break out into a drawl. I am almost positive that by the time I get back to Portland I will have reverted to the dialect of my childhood.

I don't like funerals. I don't like thinking about my grandmother having passed away, even though she lived a very long life and has left behind a rich legacy of family who cared for her and one another. I do not like death. Can we not all be immortal and leave dying to the soulless?

But in a few hours Rose and I will be in the air, flying towards the sultry greenland of the South. I'll cover up my tattoos...out of respect for conservative family members .... and will absorb as much of my mother's childhood city as much as I can. There's talk that we might tour about a bit in this birthplace city of the civil rights movement. My mother lived her entire childhood and youth in Montgomery. I hope she will be able to show us some of her living memories as we visit together, she, Rose and I, three generations of first-born daughters who've come  to pay respect to the matriarch of our family, herself a first-born daughter.

I look forward to blogging this week about Mimi as I learn more about her life.

She would have been 97 on Tuesday.