While Grandma Sanchez had probably less than two years remaining of her life, Grandpa Sanchez would live for another 12 or so productive years, surviving those two more wives who are buried next to him in the cemetery by the freeway just east of Yucaipa.
We visited the cemetery a couple of years ago, me for the first time. An unusually cold and strong wind blew, making the visit uncomfortable. One of his wives, probably the last one, has her name on his headstone. However, his other wife probably occupies the space next to his grave, but she has no headstone. I thought that sad that perhaps she had no children or friends living who would get her a headstone, to mark at least the beginning and end of her existence of earth. She might have been the third wife, who died not long before he did, so he was unable to provide one for her either since he was also dying.
Accompanying dad, we would see Grandpa Sanchez five days before he died, upon the advice of his doctor who told dad that his father had only a few days to live with his kidneys failing. Grandpa Sanchez was certain that he was 95 about the time he died, but dad was able to figure out the year he was born in Spain and that he was just shy of that age, 94 years old instead.
I look back at the arc of their lives and realize how very little I know about how Grandpa came to America after WWI, in approximately 1919. Why had he decided to leave Spain as a teenager and come to America alone? He had no other relatives here that I am aware of. We met his sister and her husband when they visited us in Orange, CA, in the early 1960's; but I don't recall anyone discussing the particulars of their lives in Spain in the early 1900's, when they were children together.
Grandpa Sanchez, in leaving Spain when he did, was long out of the country by the time Francisco Franco and the Nationalist forces initiated the bloody Spanish Civil War--nearly three years long from 1936 until 1939--with the help of the Nazi's. They were attempting to oust the elected Republican government, and they succeeded.
Grandpa was also not in Spain during all of those oppressive years of Franco's dictatorial rule, the General having long outlived those other extremist dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, by several decades. He lasted in power for 36 terrible years until he finally died in 1975, then becoming the long-running news joke on Saturday Night Live: "General Francisco Franco is still dead." An ironic epitaph if there ever was one.
As I said, I don't know how Grandma and Grandma Sanchez met since her family lived in Montana and dad was born in Martinez, CA, in 1920. So they must have met in California, but how Grandma or Grandpa got there, I do not know. How they sctually met and fell in love, I also do not know.
I suppose no one really talked about those sorts of intimate moments and memories among their generation, nor shared them with their offspring. I certainly have no idea how Grandma and Grandpa Breeze met, fell in love, and married; and they were from that same generation.
Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez raised two boys, George and Leon, while owning a grocery store. They had had a daughter who died in infancy, though I do not know what she died of or what her name was. Dad died in 2002, Leon two years later. Dad had me, Ann, and Lorri with two different wives. Leon had five children with his first wife, kept a mistress, finally divorced Lourdes, whom I have never met, and then married another woman late in his life whom I did meet when dad was dying in April of 2002 in an emergency room in Orange County.
Dad was a bombardier and an officer, as well as a P.OW. in Germany, the country from which Grandma Sanchez's family came perhaps 100 years ago; and Leon left the U.S. for Mexico before he could be drafted and serve as an enlisted man in a war that killed so many countless men and women on all sides.
Among Ann, Lorri and me, we have no offspring. Among our cousins in Mexico, I have no idea how many of them married or have offspring. Jose died childless.
It's all a rather strange situation that we kids never asked about so many details of their intimate lives, and they never really told us much either. Perhaps they thought we wouldn't be interested.
