Health Nut

My maternal grandmother, Mildred, was an extreme health nut. Not in the contemporary sense of obsessive exercise or diet, but more in a "what's going to kill me first" sense.

Some grandmas give their wee ones cookies, others perhaps a trinket or socks - Mildred was keen on dispensing vitamins. Not your average Flintstone gummies or "One-a-Day chewables", but a precise and costly collection of individual tablets for each organic compound. In those days, there was no GNC at the mall or expansive vitamin section at the grocery store, so Mildred had to get her supplies the old fashioned way - from her dealer.

Ms. Gladys was her connection; like Tupperware or Avon, Ms. Gladys was the Candy Man when it came to hawking vitamins. I don't remember the particulars of Ms. Gladys' enterprise, but I envision it to be some kind of direct sales venture where the representatives were incentivized not only by upselling for profit but also for free purges and colonics.

My little sister was notoriously picky about her diet, and Mildred was in a constant state of dither when it came to her nutritional intake. Mildred would concoct a prescriptive array of supplements to offset her dietary deficiencies - which my sister would loudly and definitively refuse to take. My grandmother was heartily offended by this rejection and would respond with the following tidbit of encouragement: "If you don't take these vitamins, you will die before you are sixteen."

To underscore her predictions of impending doom, Mildred would scour the pages of Prevention magazine and Readers Digest, underlining in thick red ink all the horrific consequences suffered by those who did not adhere to a precise vitamin regimen. Honestly, it got to the point that we didn't want to take those damn vitamins just out of spite.

Her obsession with nutritional health extended to digestive function as well; the woman loved a good BM better than most, and what she didn't spend on vitamins she spent on an array of purgatives. I remain scarred by the memory of the glass of water from her fridge that turned out to be a cold serving of sauerkraut juice.

In retrospect, oh how I wish I had just taken the vitamins and let her love me in her own twisted way. The woman was frightened to death of sickness and death, and all she ever wanted was to protect us from it. Instead we found her annoying and laughable. Today I have an eye-rolling sadness about the whole thing.

Mildred lived to the ripe old age of 87, remaining physically healthy enough to continue working well past 80. (More about her auspicious career in a future entry.) I limit this estimation to physical health primarily because she got progressively nuttier in her later years. Most of her nuttiness was sort of endearing and charming; she still saw herself as the hot redhead of her former glory, and by God she was - Camaro and all. But she also struggled with paralytic fear of blood clots and cancer and a slew of nonspecific ailments certain to slam shut on her life.

And she did spend her last two years confined by illness and incapacity. All the vitamins in the world can't stave off the inevitable. But she surely defied the reaper with the vigor that only a dedicated health nut can muster. And oh, how I love her for it.