b. 3 May 1921
d. 4 Jan 2009
Grandma loved her children, her grandchildren and her great grandchildren without judgment and without reservation. She loved us through dreadlocks and pink hair, through piercings and tattoos, through trips to jail and trips to psychiatrists. She loved us when she threw us out of the house. She loved us when we blew holes in the foundation of her house during casual physics experiments. She loved us when we dropped the transmission in the car by throwing it into reverse at 30 miles an hour. She loved us when we knocked the garage door off its hinges. She loved us when we lost her wedding band. She loved us through divorces and deaths. She loved me so well that she taught me how to love other people. And throughout her life she made the fudge that wooed her husband in 1936. Now there was a woman who knew how to make sweets.
At the end of her life I sat with her during many hospital stays. I kept her company, and kept her primped in the best way I could with carefully filed and painted nails. I wanted all of the staff who treated her to know that her family was very close by. I would stop on the way to the hospital or nursing home and get us each a piece of pie or cake and then we would have a manicure session and talk. If she was too ill to sit up or talk I would simply sit beside her bed and knit or read.
But as loving as she was, as doting as she was with her grandchildren, Grandma was not one to be trifled with. She minded her own business and was particularly adept at keeping out of the affairs of others. But she said what needed saying. I remember once I was fussing that my husband Scott spent a lot of time in the garage (where he has tools, heat, a sink, a job site radio, a weather radio, a fridge and a TV with cable). She was firm. Where was he? He was at home. What was he doing? Something he enjoyed. Did it hurt anyone? Certainly not. “Leave him alone,” she advised.
I remember as a small child Grandma came to Virginia to collect me and take me back on a plane to stay with her and Grandpa Jack. It was my first plane ride. My family regularly spent vacations in Michigan. I remember she would sit me and my brother in the family room with TV trays that included cottage cheese salads with a pineapple ring and a maraschino cherry in the middle. I thought this was the height of fancy dining. I remember once, when I was older, she sent me a birthday card that said if I ever needed to talk I should come to her because “Grandma’s Been There Done That, Too.”
When I spoke with her in the summer of 2008 she said she was very satisfied with her life and that her greatest joys were her family: children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. As far as I know, she had no significant unfulfilled wishes or dreams.
Grandma led a Christian life, tithing to her church, serving as a deacon and as a Sunday school teacher on the Standing Committee on Christian Education. Yet all of her children went on to be atheists. Two, in large part, due to the death of their father, Fran. We’ve always been a religiously peripatetic family.
Grandma’s death was expected. It came after a long illness. She told her daughter Diane that she did not wish to extend this last part of her life. She was sitting up in her wheelchair at the nursing home where she lived; Diane was there while Grandma ate dinner. Her head slumped to one side and she stopped breathing about ten minutes later. Despite extended, debilitating health problems, her death itself was gentle.
The family gathered in Hillsdale, Michigan, the family seat, although no one in the family was currently living there. The officiating pastor at the funeral was Dudley Elvery, the Presbyterian minister who married me and Scott.
Grandma is buried at the Cadillac Memorial Gardens cemetery beside her first husband Fran in Clinton Township, Michigan.
I have chosen to have my ashes buried partly in Virginia and partly in the plot beside my grandmother and grandfather.
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