Best Foot Forward

I’m channeling Nana this week.

My maternal grandmother, Johanna Ulz Lyons, always admonished us to put our best foot forward.  I’ve tried to do that.  But that’s not where I get my resolve this week.  Rather, it’s from her extreme tenacity after her strokes.

With one side paralyzed, Nana would navigate her ranch home in Lake Knolls, Chatham, Illinois, with dogged determination.  She used a four-pronged cane.  If she had to carry anything, she’d pull it along, resting it on whatever furniture came to hand.  The stroke impacted her speech so that she could say very few words but she kept trying until her wishes became known.  If she couldn’t tell you something, she’d brush past you and go get what she wanted on her own, leaving whatever grandchild had been unable to discern her needs standing in the living room feeling only slightly less frustrated than Nana herself.

I admired my grandmother.  When the depression put her husband out of work, she knuckled down and got a job at Montgomery Wards.  She raised her three daughters to be tough but tender, just as she herself had always been.  She would sing to us when we cried; take us for meals or to buy shoes or clothing; and let us sit at her desk in the hearing aid business which she and my grandfather ran in Springfield.  I wanted to be like her.  She seemed to be the consummate woman — a mother, a wife, a business owner.

The last time that I visited her, she stood in the doorway lifting her good arm to wave goodbye.  I asked my mother, “Do you think Nana knows we’re going home?”  My mother hesitated, behind the wheel of the Dodge Coronet that Nana and Grandpa had sold her so that she’d have something in which to drive to work.  In the backseat, my brother Mark asked if Mom wanted him to run back into Nana and Grandpa’s house to make sure that Nana, home alone until later in the afternoon, had everything she needed.

My mother finally shook her head.  “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” she said.

Nana died a day or two later.  I think she knew that death waited for her.  She smiled so sweetly as we left; she kissed me on the forehead and touched my cheek with her one good hand.

Yesterday as I gimped around the house, dragging my painful left hip and pushing my coffee cup along the table, I thought of Nana.  “Put your best food forward, Mary,” she’d tell me, as we crossed the street.

I’d ask her, “Which foot is the best foot, Nana?”  She would laugh and say, “The one going first, of course.”  Every time.  And she’d laugh, every time.

In another day, my current injury will be a memory as I heal.  It’s possible that one day, I will suffer an injury from which I won’t easily recover.  That’s always a chance when a disabled person mixes bullheadedness with solitary living.  If I do, I’ll have an honorable role-model.  I’ve seen one of the finest women imaginable handle the impact of a stroke with grace and valor.  I hope that my response to adversity does her credit.

It’s the fifth day of the fortieth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

From left to right: My great-grandfather “Dad” Ulz; one of my great-uncles, possibly Coonie Ulz; Johanna Ulz Lyons; and her husband, Delmar Lyons.

 

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