Some of my earliest memories of my father’s mother are of her begging us for something. She had a sense of entitlement when it came to family, that her kids HAD to take care of her, no matter how she behaved, just because they were her kids.
I remember her moving in with us when I was a wee one, expecting us to care for her when we could barely afford ourselves. My brother and I had to share a room as his was converted into hers. She never left it, preferring to sit in front of her TV eating all day. She didn’t bring in any income at all. After a while, my dad kicked her out, and she moved in with another one of her kids.
This went on for several years until her mother fell ill, passed on, and left a sum of money for her to live off of as well as a house that she didn’t have to make any payments on. When she ran out of her parents’ savings, she sought out her kids again. I was older then, and able to understand just a little more what she was asking, and how she was asking it. She came by our house with little warning, and said she wanted to get in touch again after spending so many years away.
She commented, with sincere bitterness in her voice, that I looked like my mother. I don’t think she ever liked any of us. She really believed that she was to be taken care off and that, by having a family of his own and putting us before her, my dad had betrayed her somehow.
My parents had just bought a house. She had heard about it and wanted to move in. She was rejected. I wouldn’t see her again for a long while, not until my father’s father, her ex-husband, passed on. No one appreciated her presence at the funeral, and she was not invited to the wake. She’d shown up for her piece of his will, and was disappointed to find out that there was very little he’d left behind, and that she wouldn’t be getting any of it.
Years would pass again, and I heard she was living with one of her daughters near us. A week would pass after that when I heard that she was asked to leave. Her response was to throw herself down the stairs, attempting to make herself even more of a burden. I can imagine her saying something similar to any teenage drama queen on the internet, “now they’ll HAVE to pay attention to me!”
My aunt got her declared unstable and she’d spent the past few years in a mental hospital. She died alone. Family was notified by the hospital. The viewing’s today. Only one person is there, only because someone had to set it up. The funeral’s tomorrow. No ceremony, no one planning to go.
Goodbye, Grandma Schroeder. Good riddance.
(The reason behind the title of this entry is that, when I first saw Anne Ramsey in the Goonies as a child, I wondered why “Gramma S” was in a movie. The character portrayed by Ramsey in Throw Momma From the Train resembles her much more.)
entry backdated, originally posted on LJ