There’s a Ray Charles song that I can remember my grandmother singing when I was a girl.\u00a0Everytime I hear it, I can picture her singing it – it is so vivid I can remember the sound and pitch of her voice and the way she smelled and the way she would sing half in spanish…..\u00a0<\/p>\n
When my mom came to visit, we were playing the Ray Charles CD and when the song came on – my mom teared up and said that it was her mom’s favorite song.\u00a0 She was crying only because she missed her mom – she died when I was ten and it was a pretty traumatic event for all of us as she was a huge part of our lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today, it made me cry as I listened to it taking my son to school.\u00a0 I didn’t cry because I miss her, which I do.\u00a0 I stopped crying about missing her when I had my kids.\u00a0 I realized that I didn’t have to miss her – she was everpresent and I could feel it.\u00a0 Hard to explain unless you have had someone close to you die.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No, I cried because the song is confirmation of\u00a0my deepest suspicions that she was unhappy in many aspects in her life.\u00a0 Her marriage was a mess.\u00a0 Her choices in life didn’t work out the way she thought.\u00a0 There was a marriage before my grandfather that resulted in\u00a0the pregnancy\u00a0of my aunt.\u00a0 Her first husband wanted nothing to do with the child or the pregnancy and he abandoned\u00a0her.\u00a0\u00a0Which is when she met and married, at a full five months pregnant, my grandfather.\u00a0 He was as good to her as he could be and I love my grandfather, despite all of his mistakes, huge personality flaws\u00a0and adultery. The song is “I can’t stop loving you”<\/a> – which is a heartbreaking ballad in itself.\u00a0 The fact that my strongest memory is of my grandmother incessently playing and singing it breaks my heart.\u00a0<\/p>\n I cried because I want more for her life.\u00a0 I want her to have a chance to relive all of those incidents and accidents and not be resigned to swallow it down with a forced, martyred smile on her face.\u00a0 I want to picture her strong and capable, not degected and a victim of her slim choices, as many women of her time were.\u00a0 She loved us with all of her being – and all that love that she poured out onto everyone, I’m afraid, was never returned to her from the men in her life.\u00a0 And, being in the marriage I am – one that is beautifully composed of respect, admiration, pride and passion, I feel nothing but sadness that\u00a0she never had that.\u00a0 Because she deserved to feel all of it – she deserved to have more.\u00a0 I want more for her.\u00a0 But it is too late.<\/p>\n And, then,\u00a0I look at my daughter – and\u00a0myself – and I think that it can’t be too late.\u00a0 We are how her life becomes rectified.\u00a0 I\u00a0know she is watching me – the choices I make, the way I will show my daughter how to be better than I could ever be, the way my daughter and I will expect more from any relationship that we forge in our lives, and the way we will remember her for all that she was and all that she couldn’t find the strength or support\u00a0to be.\u00a0 And I know she is proud.\u00a0 But I am sad.\u00a0 And, I don’t know that her sadness will ever be washed out of my heart.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s a Ray Charles song that I can remember my grandmother singing when I was a girl.\u00a0Everytime I hear it, I can picture her singing it – it is so vivid I can remember…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,44,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-living","category-grief-and-loss","category-relationships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}