Caregiving Brought Her Closer to Her Grandfather

Hi Guideposts, I’m Mary Pembleton. In 2014, the year my second son was born, my grandfather needed a place to stay and somebody to care for him. So he moved in with myself and my husband and our two sons. And in the process, it gave me a really great opportunity to develop a close relationship with a man who I had feared when I was growing up.

The most surprising that I learned about my grandfather through our caregiving journey was that he had a really soft, beautiful, compassionate side to him. When I was a child, growing up, he was a very stern, very traditional, authoritarian man in my life and when he moved in with us and those roles were forced to shift, he really showed me, you know, this really beautiful vulnerability. It gave me a lot more room to develop a really strong relationship with him.

The best memory I have of my grandfather is when I was growing up, he would throw these really phenomenal parties at his house on the South Fork River in Belmont, North Carolina, and he would, he would captain his pontoon boat and take group after group out and I would just stay on the boat the whole time and just be at the front of the boat and feeling the wind in my face and the water splashing and it was a really wonderful way to spend my weekends growing up.

My grandfather prided himself on being a fancy dresser and his favorite outfit was, he had this really soft, beautiful, beige cashmere sweater by Chanel that he had purchased way back in the ’80s and when he was living with us, he insisted on wearing it almost every day.