I didn't know my grandparents well but I got a strong impression that my grandfather was very strict and expected to be catered to by his womenfolk. My grandmother was a tiny, sweet little thing. She was less than five feet tall to my grandfather's six feet. I think my mother had a very strict upbringing though not very religious upbringing. I know she went to church with her mother but her father never went to church.

My mother went to four years of bible school, the Bay City Bible Institute, then a year or two of nurses training at Biola Bible Institute. She wanted to go to China as a missionary but China closed about this time so she went to Mexico where she met my father. In the bible school pictures she looks like she has everything wonderful before her.

She is a very strong minded woman. Even deep into Altzheimers, she is very determined when she wants to do something. It's just been in the last year when she just sleeps most of the time that she isn't wanting to do something all the time. When she first was in the Altzheimers ward she drove them crazy because she just walked and walked and walked. Sometimes for twenty four hours at a time, except for eating. She didn't like missing meals. She kept trying to do things, make beds, straighten up, find someone, whatever.

When she was in her 50s she went back to college and finished up her bachelors degree and got her masters in Anthropology. She graduated with honors. That's better than I ever did. She read constantly, was a whiz at scrabble, and could do crossword puzzles with a pen.

I got the feeling that she was not happy much of the time because she felt hemmed in and frustrated. She had so many dreams that she couldn't reach and, while she loved us, she wanted to be able to get out on her own and reach for some of those dreams, but that just wasn't done in her world. You did the proper thing. You didn't just take off and do your own thing.

In the last few years she was at home, before the Altzheimers started, she began to withdraw from people and live in her own world. I think part of this was a feeling of disappointment about what she had accomplished. She accomplished a lot. She raised five children, and we turned out pretty good. She did all the medical work where we lived in Mexico (with one year of nurses training). We lived six to eight hours walk from the nearest car road and she did everything but surgery.

She was always a delightful person to talk to and had well thought out views on issues. She was a conservative but once told me that she wished that she could have marched in the civil rights marches in the 50s. She was prolife but said that the whole time they were in the mountains, so many women came begging for something to end a pregnancy, and she didn't really know what to do for them. She watched so many babies die, though she had a better record than the curanderas, the local witch doctors. She said that she understood why women wanted abortions even though she didn't really approve of abortions and felt that the emphasis should be on avoiding pregnancies, though she didn't even have that to give them at the time.

I miss my mother so much even though she is still alive and I know that when she does die there will be an empty place inside me.