Two Grandmothers

I was blessed with two very different grandmothers who taught me the same lesson by the opposite ways they dealt with oppression and approached life.
Both grew up in large mixed blood French Canadian families raised on small farms speaking only French in different New England states, both were millworkers in their youths, as were their husbands.
One lived her 86 years in fear.
She was nostalgic for the Acadia of her ancestors and never seemed to get over the ancestral pain of the genocide that began with the Grand Derangement in September 1755.
My other grandmother was proud and defiant.
This grandmother chose love over fear.
She had a reproduction of Custer's Last Stand in her back stairway and stood up to her in-laws when they criticized her baby, my mother, for her ugly Indian looks.
This grandmother had both Acadian ancestors and her Blood maternal great-grandmother who lived to be 104 years old and helped Mimi's mother raise her and her many siblings after her grandmother died early from diabetes. Mimi suffered dire poverty and many hardships and tragedies as a child and lived a modest life as a millworker's wife with 4 children as an adult. But she embraced life, shared laughter and chose love over fear.
This grandmother smiled and loved and inspired those she met to pass it on.
She lived to be 94 years old and died on her 94th birthday. Hundreds of people of all generations in her small town came to her funeral and followed the procession to her gravesite.
A woman once told me that I would change my mind about being joyous about aging once I reached my 70s and saw how people discriminate against the elderly.
But I don't think I will change my mind. I know the realities of age discrimination.
But my grandmothers taught my by their lives that while aging is inevitable, we can control how we react to it. One grandmother chose fear and the other love. One lived and died happy and made others feel happy and loved.
by Charleen Touchette - March 9, 2009