By 1988, my grandmother, Margaret (Dykhoff) Sweere, was diagnosed with heart failure after an incident at home when she left a burner of the gas range set to "on" and my aunt Judy came home from work one afternoon to the smell the natural gas. This was the first clue that Gramma had lost her sense of smell, so Judy took her to the doctor for a check-up. We were all sad to hear the what the doctor had declared.

But Gramma never had her driver's license, and she walked everywhere. After Grampa died in 1979, she walked every morning to the Post Office to get the mail, and every afternoon to the Village Hall to play Sheep's Head for nickles with the Senior Citicen's Club.

My dad says, too, that when they were kids on the Stock Farm in Butler and working in the fields druing the day, Gramma would drop her household chores, walk out to where ever they were working and bring them lunch, then walk all the way back home again. And on Saturdays, she would gather ten dozen eggs and walk to the Butler store with those eggs, to sell them for the fifteen cents she'd put in the collection at church the next morning.

Ten years later, on June 14,1998, we all gathered together to ay Gramma's house on Gehl Lane in Hilbert to celebrate Gramma's 95th birthday and she was still going strong. I remember teasing her that she was born the same year as harley Davidson, and she laughed as usual, saying she had seen a lot of things invented in her lifetime.

In the next year and a half, Gramma began to sleep more and more each day. Judy made out a monthly calendar and everyone pitched in when they had a few hours here and there to go sit with Gramma while Judy was gone to work, since even though she was sleeping most of the time, no one wanted her to be alone.

One afternoon as I was sitting with Gramma, she stirred from her sleep to find me there. She sat up and looked over to the bedside and found her glasses. Once she put them on and saw it was me, she said "You know you're too old when you go to sleep and half of you goes on the nightstand."

I laughed then, as she continued "I think it's time, Jodi. If I don't get going pretty soon, your Grampa's gonna think I went the other way!"

She died not long after, at the ripe old age of 96, and a full 12 years after the doctor told us the bad news.

Author: Jodi A. Sweere (ID# I0002 )