10/17/2023
When I was young my grandmother moved in with our family. She was a beautiful woman who always had to have her hair “just so”. She would go to the hair salon once a week to get her hair done and it always looked perfect the whole week. As the years progressed she started to become lost to us due to dementia. As she neared the end of her life she usually didn’t recognize me anymore, she usually thought I was her hairdresser. We were told to not fight her on what and who she thought we were or what year it was, etc.. doing so only distressed her. So I obligingly would grab her brush and start brushing her hair and massaging her scalp and asking her about her day or a memory of hers. I learned so much from her over the years. She tried to teach me Latin and she taught me and my sister a secret language that we still use to this day. She taught me palmistry and told me about our ancestors. (Sir Walter Raleigh and a woman who’s name I can’t recall but who was killed for witchcraft) she ignited my interests in genealogy and languages and magic.
The day she passed, it was peacefully and in her sleep. She always said she’d live to be 92 and she died 5 days after her 92nd birthday. Somehow, she just knew. I was a teenager then and I decided to go visit with her when I found her dead. Her forehead was still warm and her hair looked lovely.
In many ways she inspired my future profession.
A couple weeks ago my dad gave me an old photo of grandma. On the back it says it was taken by her hairdresser.💖 I think I look like her (although her eyebrows are nicer than mine, lol)
Photo taken in 1930’s of Claudia Marshall