Unfiltered Story #285360

(I’m the poster of “This Is A Non-Service Announcement” and this is part of the family get-together that ended up being a year or two after grammie’s passing. Which, looking back on how my grammie was, was rather fitting. We’re telling stories about our own interactions with her. In attendance are myself, my parents, my brother, and one of my mom’s sisters.)

Brother: “Remember when Grandma sent me to the hospital?”

Me: “Wait, what did Grammie do?”

Brother: “I was standing in the cart and she kept telling me to sit down, but I wouldn’t. So she stopped the cart really fast and I fell out and landed head first.”

Dad: *shaking his head, clearly joking* “And that’s when all the trouble with you started.”

Mom: “And [dad], remember when she left [my name] in her carrier alone on the table in [store] food court?”

Me: “What!?”

Mom: “Oh yeah, I asked her to get us something to eat while I paid for our stuff, and when I went to join you guys she’d left you on the table and was in line to get the food. So I just picked you up and went around the corner until she noticed you were gone.”

Me: “How long did that take?”

Mom: “Oh, about five minutes or so? She came around the corner looking for you and I said ‘you’re never doing that with my kids again’ and probably took a year off her life.”

Aunt: “Oh I heard about that! Still can’t believe Mom did that. Remember when she made those lemon bars when you introduced us to [my dad]?”

Dad: “Oh those were so bad!” *laughing* “Your grandma would dump bags into glass jars, so she could store more in the cabinet, but she didn’t label them.”

Mom: *now laughing herself* “So she made these lemon bars for dessert, and she somehow accidentally put corn starch on them instead of powdered sugar.”

Me: “Is now a good time to tell you guys about how sometimes when you’d have me run errands with her, I’d offer to get out and move a shopping cart out of the way so she could park only for her to refuse and just push it out of the way with her car?”

(It’s at this point that we all just start to break down laughing. It’s been a few years since Grammie passed, and I’m always gonna miss her, but at least when I think back on her I don’t think about her dementia and how she struggled to tell her daughters apart or called my brother by our cousins’ names. I think of the funny stories about my grammie, and really? That’s how she’d want it to be, fun memories and laughter.)