Something to Offer

My mother drives down from Canada, and twice a year she parks her car here while she takes the Amtrak to Michigan where she visits her own mother. My grandmother is a Finnish icon for our family heritage with ample “sisu” in her system. The short definition of “sisu” is “spunk,” but my sense of it has always been: “That stuff you need in order to get through anything, and make an impression on others while you do.” I am proud to have inherited some of that, and to see it in the rest of my mother’s side of the family. (By the way, my father’s side has it, too, but it’s called “Grimm Determination”).

When Mom came back from this visit, she told me how Grandmother is doing now that she’s turned 96. The feeling in her hands and feet are diminishing, and she uses a wheel chair. She has slowly had to relinquish abilities that she took for granted, as we all do, like putting on shoes and picking up a vitamin pill. My mother and her sisters have been doing so much for Grandmother Sisu that I can only imagine her frustration, because while her body has been slowing down her mind has been working as well as ever. The social, laughing, experience-fed personality can’t just go be social whenever she wants. She has broken too many bones to chance a truly horrible and completely disabling injury. But she wants to hear every conversation, she watches TV and enjoys the storylines, she submerses herself in visitors and savors the exchanges with people she’s never met before as much as with family and friends.

When I think of what she may be going through, I look at my life. What if I couldn’t pick up a pen anymore? What if my fingers couldn’t keep up with my thoughts on a keyboard? If I couldn’t go to my son’s track meets or school functions, and just sat and watched TV, I wouldn’t be out in the world seeing friends, making acquaintances, affecting my surroundings and feeling as though I’m making a mark. I realize, thinking of this situation, that without noticing it I’m dropping pebbles of inspiration, encouragement, smiles, empathy, and the occasional surprise conversation wherever I go. If all of that stopped… how would I identify myself?

Is my Grandmother Sisu going through this? After the life she’s lived, and people she has impacted, I despair to think she is losing herself. Then I remembered something I’d read recently: People feel they have worth if they are asked about their stories of life. If they’re asked how they feel about something, what their opinion is, have they ever experienced such a situation, that show of concern or desire for their wisdom will strengthen their sense of being worth having around. My mother and her sisters probably know all of her stories, and being immersed in her life they probably ask her opinion of things as much as I ask my husband his – almost never, because I assume I know him well enough.

But I don’t know my grandmother’s stories. And I love her. I want to make sure she knows she has worth, something to offer the world even as her body begins making its nest for its final rest. She has something that, once I gain it, I will carry and cherish while I live. She is half a country away from me, but I will strive to get to her so I can hear her tell her stories. So I can hear her laugh and hug her for the first time in fifteen years, and bask in her presence.

Is there someone you know whose story you haven’t heard? Even a peer, not an elder. Even the five-year-old who isn’t playing with anyone on the playground. The lone kid leaning defiantly against a light post. Ask them, “If you were stuck in the last book you read, what would you be going through?” or “If you were a teacher, how would you let kids learn in your classroom?” or “What’s your idea of a perfect vacation?” Any question that, when you get down to it, asks them who they are. That is what anyone needs to know they are cherished by someone even a little, and it’s a power each of us carries.

#questions #finnish #grandmother #sisu