Nanny

Nanny,

I am so sorry that I could not save you.

That I could not be as strong as you were to reach in and pull you from deaths embrace with my bare hands.

To wrestle with fate himself and make him give you more time.

That I could not make your last couple of years a dream for you because it's what you deserved.

The guilt eats away at me daily and sometimes I find myself having to forget you completely to escape it and then I hate myself even more.

Who am I to forget the person who sacrificed her life for so many others?

Who put aside her own wants and needs all of the time to get nothing in return.

So I will do this thing.

I will let the world know you and maybe they can love you with me so that it bears up your soul and gives you the recognition you deserve.

You were born at home.

You came into this world a small thing.

They threw you to the side thinking you were dead and did what they could to save your mother.

Even then you were strong, a warrior.

You fought your way into this world with little fist punching the sky as your cry broke the chaos of raised voices.

Alive.

You broke through the barrier of worlds winning yourself a soul just to ask yourself over and over again, why?

My heart breaks for you even now as I write this. I cannot keep the tears from coming.

I wish I could go back in time and save that little girl from all of her pain.

Yet, that is what made you.

It was the bone bare truth of you.

I will not do your memory a disservice by mentioning the details of all of the abuse you suffered as a child.

I can hear you now mad as hell in my ear telling me to keep your business, your business.

You're disagreeing that you were strong at all.

You don't want me to write about you.

Always content to live in the shadows.

The shadows of your sisters.

The shadows cast by your father and brothers who had a sickness so skewered within them it rotted their insides and everything they touched.

They tried to give you their disease but you were made of far stronger stuff than that.

You were a fortress.

You fought your entire life.

From growing up dirt poor in South Carolina to marrying a military man who sent you only a few dollars a month when he was in Vietnam.

You had to work your fingers to the bone in the mill houses just to make ends meet.

And you never once complained.

You would turn around and spend that money you had worked so hard for on your two daughters and never on yourself.

Even when he came back home and couldn't function piss drunk all the time to stay the PTSD, you forged ahead.

You were always so proud that your mother was little Irene, one of the children who inspired Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to write The Yearling. It was your claim to fame.

She said your mother's family were fae like in their wildness.

Is that what made you so?

The native blood in your veins from your mother and fathers side?

You survived countless wounds most of us will not experience even once.

I see you.

I want you to know I always have.

My grandmother, my nanny.

The woman who raised me.

Who built me up and charged me with the power of unshakeable faith.

Faith to keep going when it would be easier to quit.

Faith to ignore the fear of what might lie on the other side.

I hear your laugh.

Your kind voice.

I see your long black hair, and short grey.

You seemed so much larger than your four feet 11 inches.

Maiden, Mother, Matriarch.

The wisdom that you held.

I stood in awe of you daily.

You were such a shining remarkable thing that even that man you had married could not bare to lose you and so brought himself out of so much darkness to win you back.

Yet you could not see this in yourself.

You were so shy.

I always wondered that someone strong enough to plow her huge garden with her husband could turn around and then blush and duck her head so.

You were the embodiment of true femininity to me.

Strong yet soft.

Strong enough to hold the world upon her shoulders and sweet enough to care for the children at her feet.

Never once showing any pain.

I remember your first heart attack.

You powered through it for more than two hours before having to relent.

That was the first time I saw any sign of weakness in you and it scared me.

This mythical woman could be brought down?

My foundation shook.

The same day you left the hospital you went right back to work.

You cared for the widows and those older than yourself for more than twenty years.

You treated each one with such kindness and care.

Brushing their hair, bathing them, even lifting them by yourself.

When you would sit to rest you were so tired your head would drift back and snores would leave you almost immediately.

This is something that sticks with me.

How completely exhausted you were but how you persevered.

Then you would come home and work the garden with papa growing more food than we needed just to give most of it away.

Feeding others.

That's who you were.

The woman who silently walked five hundred dollars that you could not spare to your neighbor so that she would not lose her house and dared me to tell anyone.

I'm sorry that I am now because you never wanted to take credit but they need to know you.

It saddens me that the world will not.

That you will be lost in the fray.

No plaques or stories written for you.

I will write them nanny.

I will write them.

Later on you would beat your feet and wring your hands in pain when you thought no one was looking.

Yet you continued working more than 12 hour days and most of them on your feet.

Diabetes, nerve pain so bad it made you rub a whole in your foot.

Yet you kept going.

Raising all of us, these ungrateful children as well as working so hard.

Forgive us.

When you finally succumbed to your conditions we were all in shock.

I will admit it was nice to see you finally rest.

I am so thankful for those still moments together in the hospital.

I am glad I got to take care of you for once.

I just never felt good enough.

There was always more that I could do.

I was not living up to that impossible measure you had set.

Yet you loved me anyways.

You loved me through the darkness of my life when I was weak and wilted by depression and self medicated my way into addiction.

You helped me fight my way back out of it.

You gave me the strength I needed to draw on to save myself.

Thank you.

Thank you the blood in this beating heart.

It beats like a warrior drum.

The times I would lay my head against your chest and listen to the thumping there and how it matched my own.

That heart that eventually failed you.

It itself even was not as strong as you.

The doctors stood in shock as you kept fighting your way back from the brink of death.

We all thought you would make it.

The day you died the sky was blue.

Cloudless.

The birds sang in the trees.

I sat in shock and cursed the world itself.

How could it not mourn you?

You, that woman of legends.

Then I realized that maybe they were celebrating your return to the great spirit.

Rejoicing in your battle fought.

That thought gave me a little comfort.

I will always love you.

I miss you everyday.

I will make them remember you.

A woman stronger than the world.

My nanny.