Grandma's Words of Comfort

I've mentioned my grandma (my mom's mom) before, but it's difficult to describe in just one post her humor, her personality and her unfortunate knack for sticking her foot in her mouth in THE WORST moments. This is a woman who means well in every circumstance. But despite her best efforts to convey her condolences or "best wishes," she tends to get flustered, her words get jumbled, and she says exactly OPPOSITE of what she means to say. Unfortunately this means that she frequently says something inappropriate to the situation. Now, I'm not revealing anything that might embarrass Grandma. These are stories that my family repeats often, because they are just too good to keep to ourselves. Also, I think they reveal something honest and pure about her, while also demonstrating her ability to not take herself too seriously.


For example, Grandma has a reputation among our family for saying the wrong thing in times of tragedy. At the funeral of her cousin, Grandma went to offer her condolences to the wife of the deceased. Instead of the appropriate, "my condolences" or "I'm so sorry for your loss," the unfortunate sentiment that came out of Grandma's mouth was "Congratulations!" There was also the funeral of another family member where Grandma was offering her sympathies to a cousin. Grandma attempted to introduce my Mom to this grieving woman, but instead said, "You remember Imogene..." "Imogene" was tragically NOT the name of my Mom, which Grandma meant to say, but the name of this poor woman's recently dead daughter!

In another tragic moment, a dear friend of Grandma's lost her son-in-law. It was a horrible story where the severely depressed man took his own life by hanging himself. Grandma, in relaying the awful story to my mom said, in all seriousness and not realizing that she was using common expressions that actually described the true details of this man's death, "Well, I guess something just snapped! He must have been at the end of his rope..." THANKFULLY those particular words were NOT the ones she used when attempting to comfort her friend, the mother-in-law of the deceased!

Another classic Grandma moment occurred in an everyday situation that our family still giggles about today. Grandma worked at the creamery in town for most of her adult life. Working with mostly men couldn't have been easy, as she was a working woman and mother during the 50's and 60's. Talking to a group of both male and female co-workers, the discussion among them was about hair styles. In Grandma's knack for turning the conversation suddenly awkward, she said "Well, I have plenty of curls, they're just at the wrong end..." She was talking about her hair permanent growing out leaving the top portion (her roots) straight while the ends still retained the perm! But, if you're like me, and unfortunately all of Grandma's co-workers, you may have taken those words as referring to another set of "curls." Ugh!

There are a lot more incidences involving Grandma's interesting choice of words. Most are probably best understood and appreciated by our family, because it's true that you just have to know her and her mastery of the Freudian slip.