Personal Narrative: An Interview With My Grandma

I interviewed my grandmother, Cynthia Bonsey. She is 78, has six children and 10 grandchildren. She was a teacher in the early 60’s and married her husband, Roland, in 1961. She retired, in Lisbon, Maine in her early sixties, staying in the same house she raised her kids in. She was my biological grandmother’s best friend before she passed. After my grandmother’s death, Cynthia (or Grandma Bonsey) took over the role as my grandmother.
Cynthia was mostly concerned with her arthritis when I asked about any physical pain she was experiencing. This is common among people in late adulthood, and is caused by inflammation of one or more joints (Burt, and Harris, 1994). She pointed out that opening jars as well as climbing stairs were made difficult since she started to feel her arthritis pain, which is average for
She was 7 when World War II ended, she was 12 when the Korean war started, she was 30 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated (US History Timeline). The list goes on. She told me that she remembered hearing the news that Hitler was dead. Just that event would be traumatic enough to alter someone’s life, yet she lived through so much more. When she was 17, her father died in a work accident, a devastating loss to a young girl. All of these events added high stressors to her life, which, even though she did not specifically comment on it, must have had an impact on her overall development. These stressors can cause a multitude of developmental problems, and research suggests that there is a link between lifealtering stressors (such as the death of a parent) and cognitive development (Aldwin, 1994). Cynthia seems more than normal in her cognition, but it would not surprise me if there is a lasting affect from living through the events she did. Cynthia has experienced more in her life than anyone else I know, and everything has shaped her into the amazing grandmother and person that she