August 5, 2011 by phrodeo
Decided this blog needed a new look. Seeing as I know html and have done web design I should probably do my own template or get a domain or something. I did it years ago and it was kind of a pain – seemed like every time I turned around there was something to renew. So, anyway, instead I decided to pick a new wordpress template that better reflected me. I liked the old one, but it was a little drab and I love lots of color.
The picture in the header is of my grandmother, Ginger DelGrosso. She had been a dancer on the Broadway stage before marrying my Papa. I love all of the glamorous black and white photos we have of her. She also had a wicked sense of humor & loved a good practical joke. She could down a whole loaf of the delicious seeded Scali bread from the local Boston bakeries. She owned boxers and Boston terriers and loved them fiercely. She would say, “Love me, love my dogs.” Many, many people adored my Nana, so I guess those dogs must have had a lot of people who loved them, too.
My Nana was paralyzed in a car accident a few before I was born. She had limited communicative abilities and couldn’t use her right side. (When she was in the hospital, they found several of those loaves of Scali bread hidden around the house – she was hiding them from the 3 boys so she could have them to herself!) She was limited to being in a wheelchair or her bed, a special one with rails that could move up and down and have different angles via remote control. When I was small, I would climb over the rails and snuggle on the bed next to her.
We were there every Sunday, and as kids do, we treated her rehab equipment as ersatz playthings. We used the remote control bed when she was up in her chair. My brother and I played a game where one of us would get in her wheelchair and close our eyes, and the other one would wheel the chair around and narrate a trip through a spooky haunted house. I often pretended I had lost control of the wheelchair and it had plunged down the stairs. I would shake the chair around (older siblings suck sometimes). My brother would first get freaked out, then sore at me. I don’t blame him.
She also had what looked like parallel bars, for trying to strengthen muscles and perhaps get back to walking (it was never to be however). I would make up gymnastics routines on the bars and try not to do too hard a dismount onto the hardwood floors.
Later when I studied to be a speech pathologist (another thing that was never to be), I learned the specifics of what she experienced. She had Broca’s aphasia, which means she could process all of the language she heard from others, but could not express a lot of words herself. She had a limited vocabulary and slurred speech. The phrases she said to us most were “A lotta clothes – you,” which meant that when she was well and could walk again, she was going to take me on a shopping spree. She also said “Bottom of my heart.” For some reason I keyed in to her speaking really well and there were times that she was asking for something and my folks would fetch me b/c I was the only one who could translate. There was not much I could do to make her situation better except occasionally translate her needs, and love her and share all of the many exciting things in a kids life that she could not leave her house to see.
It’s hard not to feel badly that there are now developments in alternative communication that could have helped her express her thoughts and wishes. I have cried so many times thinking of the way this glorious, funny dancer became trapped in a body that had limited movement and speech. If it had been years later she could have had so much more. But it wasn’t to be. She passed away when I was fourteen. In my memory there are two Nanas – Before, when she was intact but unknown to me; and After, when she was ill but known and loved from the bottom of my heart.