That's Billie Lopeman. My grandmother.
The daughter of Montana Homesteaders, she was given the birth name of Agnes-A name she always hated. She'll tell anyone who'll listen that she never really wanted to be a girl. She wanted to be a boy and do the rough and tumble "boy things". Ride horses. Get dirty. Chase rattlesnakes. And she never let being a girl stop her. She did all those things in the ever present shadow of Montana's Sweetgrass Hills. Billie was born in the family's small home, 15 miles north of what is today the ghost town of Devon. Somewhere along the way they quit calling her Agnes. They started calling her Billie. The name stuck. It stuck for over 88 years.
When she was seven, she got her wish to truly become "one of the boys". Helping her father pull up stakes after drought struck, the family abandoned the homestead and moved over a hundred miles west to the other side of Cutbank, Montana. Resettling near a place no one really remembers anymore called Sundance, Billie drove horses, cattle and the families other livestock on her big black horse called Babe. She rode saddle sore for several days, sleeping in homes along the way and picking up "bed bugs".
Arriving in Sundance, dirty, tired and exhausted, she still remembers the smell of alfalfa and how green everything was. Oh, and the way the Rockies rose straight up out of the ground. "I'd never seen nothing so beautiful Tim. Then I knew I was in a place where God was a bit kinder."
That the area between Cutbank and East Glacier might represent a gentler God, isn't something you can argue with Billie. No matter how many times it the coldest place in the nation in a single winter.
The family built a home near the Seville settlement, smak dab on the Blackfoot Nation, and the home still stands, owned by long term family friend Chet Gooth. Its been added onto, there are outbuilding and several old restored wagons. Its the kind of place thats getting rarer and rarer in Montana. A place where old timers stuck it out.
Billies been sticking it out too.
After leaving her beloved Montana, she's survived three husbands, and is still enduring the antics of her only child, and her grandkids. Her grandson's try her patience with their failed relationships, her daughter tries her patience period. Her great grandaughter reminds Billie of her own endless "try" at that age and her only granddaughter she still refers to as part of her "set".
In January Billie spent alot of time in Ambulances. Several episodes of congestive heart failure challenged her reserves of "try". Blood pressure readings of 257/125 did permenant damage. She spent time in hospital emergency rooms and time spent riding around enroute to different trauma centers. It's taken its toll.
The strange thing about being 88 isn't the magic of outliving so many people, its the reality of living with an understanding that the edge of the edge is never that far away. We all sense that. When the phone rings now, I pretty much jump. I hope against hope its not that call.
Billie spoke to me from the hospital on Sunday. "Tim, you need to be prepared. You need to be prepared for anything now."
I knew what she was talking about, but I pretended not to. How can you be prepared for losing the bedrock of a family, the matriarch that always seems to have wisdom and advice and who has offered more second chances than God himself?
Late on Christmas Day, my now former boyfriend Ed and me gave my grandmother a ride back to the apartment she is living in. Its become a big joke, the process involved when grandma rides around in my 4x4. I have to lift her in, and we have a signal, and sometimes as I bend under her she will say the most un grandma like things...Once, in front of my very uptight mother she whispered to me as I placed my hands under her rear end, "Tim, if you touch me there again, you will have to marry me."
"Grandma!"
I damn near dropped her. We were both laughing so hard. My mom wanted in on the joke. We both knew that the poor preachers wife did not need to know what we were giggling about. She'd never be the same hearing that talk from her mother.
That Christmas Night, as we gave grandma a hug and wished her a wonderful holiday, Ed burst into tears as soon as her door closed. There was a look he recognized that registered in Billies eyes. Translated, her gaze was one of a final goodbye, and one of sadness. I had never seen Ed so vulnerable, and that he would care so much for someone so dear to me, meant more than just about any gift I could have received.
Today, Grandma left the hospital. She can't walk, and because she can't walk, we had to put her in a nursing home. The residents at the apartment house where she lives all want her back. They will hold her apartment as long as it takes, because Billie has become a fixture there, indeed she is their oldest " independent active" resident. She brings optimism and companionship to those far younger than she. We also desperately hope she can go back to her apartment, the first "New Place" she's ever lived in.
Billie tells me I need to be prepared for anything, but that is no small order. I can't really imagine the future without Billie Lopeman. But, I can't imagine her in a nursing home either. In fact, right now I really can't imagine much more beyond today, and the prayer that tomorrow comes and that Billie can walk. Because in all of this talk about being 88, about these final years representing some golden reward, I'm just not seeing it.
But then again, I am not exactly Billie Lopeman. The woman who thinks Cutbank, Montana resembles a gentler God.
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