She Calls Me Raymond

Grandma and me

I helped take care of one of my grandmothers before she died in 2002. She had congestive heart failure, diabetes and she was susceptible to bouts of various infections. Whenever she would come down with an infection, her fever would go up and she would become a different person.

She grew up on a farm in the 1920s in Arkansas and I think that’s the place she went to in her mind when she was sick. With her eyes closed, she would reach out with her hands as if she were picking cotton. After she was treated with antibiotics she would come out of it. 

Other times, when she was sick, she would say things that didn’t make any sense to me. She’d talk about hanging tools on the wall or stacking boxes in the corner of her bedroom even though her bedroom didn't have any boxes in it. She was living in another time period, and eventually I learned to go with it until she got better.

Those were tough times, but rather than trying to convince her she was in the wrong time period, I did my best to enter the time period she was living in. I didn’t always do it well, but nobody trains you for situations like these.

I haven’t thought a lot about the last couple years of my grandmother’s life since she died. Instead, I think about the Christmas gatherings, and the Thursday night meals she used to cook and the old Bible she used to underline passages in. But yesterday, I heard a song on the radio by a singer I’ve never heard of and he brought me back to that place.

His name is Brett Eldredge and the name of the song is "Raymond." The circumstances in the song are different than the ones my grandmother and I faced, but the woman Eldredge sings about thinks its 1943 and rather than trying to tell her she’s wrong, the man in the song enters her world and it ends up filling a void in his life.

I cried as I listened to the song. Here’s a link to it on YouTube (embedding has been disabled). See if you can get through it without shedding any tears.