my grandma on my dad's side, my father's mother, passed away today at 98 years old. the family was around her side at the nursing home while she passed. the doctor's were told not to do any life support. she was 98 and she had had a long full life.

i was never that close with her, other than through family visits once or twice a year. but i always felt we had so much familial language in common. when we were around her and my father's family, my twang would get strong and deep and words that had no definition in the english language suddenly made so much sense to us all. she and my father's family were from jonesboro, arkansas, deep in ozark bible belt rustic poor-white rural folk world. the language was always still there even after moving up to the city-life of the outskirts of kansas city.

there are small things i remember. i remember that she had the largest wall-covering-photo of jesus hanging on the wall next to her bed. i remember the halo-ed sun behind his head and the sheep in the photo. it was one of those old black velvet type pieces, but it was brownish and beautiful in its tackiness and in the way it symbolized her religion for herself. i remember her house was full of religious iconography and jesus paintings and statements from jesus and prayerful hands and, well, as i used to say, she's probably the most religious person i'd ever met. i'm not sure that's true exactly, as there are different ways to express religion, but she certainly had her way of expressing her religion with fixtures and discussion topics and activities and family-ways and everything.

i remember her old house, the one my father and his siblings were raised in. it wasn't nothing but a very small home with barely one bedroom and barely another that was sort of there and barely an attic that served as a third. but it was full of her life and her family and when we would visit we could see the history all around us. and my father and his family would regale us would stories of how they all slept together huddled in one bed and how they all would run all over the house and how they would get warmth from the wood-burning stove in the living room, and how just how the old times were.

my grandma was a link to my father's history and now that she's gone, and now that one of his brother's is gone, i wonder where the history of a family goes once it goes continually on. do we pass it on and/or do we live it each day? do we hold it close to us or do we release it and let it go its own way?

as i write all of this i feel my twang and my old language habits etch in my brain right now. i think of how giddy we would all be when we could talk like that with each other and laugh about it and love that we all got it together and had the same language and loved each other in commonality and personality and vibrancy. i know now that my twang is not just a dialect, but a gift from my family's history. my twang is my family and i shall have my history continue to live on in my speech. my grandma, my father's mother, will live on in my father, and in me, and in my family everyday, continually. history never ends and family carries on.