Rest in Peace, Grandma

She grew up in New Orleans during the Great Depression, and met my grandad when they were both teenagers working in a shipping company office in the early '40s. She was a year older, with a boyfriend; to her he was just a kid. When he enlisted in the Navy, he asked her to write to him, and she did. "That's what we did, you know, someone would ask you to write to them, and you would. It didn't mean anything, necessarily; it was more like your patriotic duty."

It meant something to him, though. And when he got back to town and knocked on her door, she took one look at him -- all grown up and filled out, in his white Navy uniform with his blue eyes blazing -- and said to herself, "That's for me." (She always ended this story by confiding, "The men always think they pick us, but really we pick them.")

Ted became an army pilot, and Rosemary followed him all over post-war Europe and back to the South, eventually settling down in Corpus Christi, Texas. They had three daughters along the way; my mother was the eldest. Her sisters Debi and Jackie stayed in Texas, but Shan left for MIT in 1964 and never went back. (Oh, there were visits... I gather they were somewhat tumultuous -- like the time she showed up on a motorcycle, wearing a leather miniskirt.)

Because we lived so far away, I grew up not knowing my grandparents all that well (my dad was the one sibling who moved across the continent from his family too, now that I think about it). And I have only the haziest sense of my mother's sometimes complicated relationship with her parents and sisters.

I loved visiting them, though -- their cozy southern accents, the way grandma smiled that dazzling smile and called me "dear heart," how excited grandad was to show me the toy he'd invented just for me, their clear consensus that I was quite possibly the most brilliant, charming, and beautiful young lady ever to walk the earth. Even though they weren't part of my daily life, I knew they had produced my mom -- I recognized them in her -- and I knew that some part of me had come from them too. (I sometimes wished my inheritance had included a helping of grandma's glamorous beauty -- like maybe those long, elegant fingernails she always kept so perfectly shaped and polished.)

She went to college in her fifties -- "I thought if my daughters could do it, I could too." Here she is at her graduation, with me on the left and her mom on the right.


She became a credit counselor, and I imagine her easy smile and welcoming demeanor must have gone a long way toward setting her stressed-out clients at ease.

My grandad died in 2003, and grandma lived with Jackie for a while before moving into a lovely retirement home called the Heritage. Lexi and I visited her there last May with the video camera, so we could record some of her memories.

Grandma was a great storyteller (she had recorded many of her life stories in a writing class she took) but she had definitely developed a propensity to ramble a bit -- and to bring every story around to a rosy "it's all for the best" conclusion. Even the one about when Grandad was in Korea and the telegram came saying he'd been wounded in action: "When he found out about that he was so mad! He said 'I told them not to tell you that -- it was just a little shrapnel in my hand!'"

Sometimes we wondered if she might be revising events in her head to make them more bearable -- a perfectly understandable tendency that no doubt served her well in some ways over the course of her life, but which might be exasperating to those who remember things differently. In one instance, she told us about the time she took Shan to a pediatrician who treated her like an idiot and called her questions "stupid." "Well, I said, 'Thank you very much, Doctor, and let me tell you something. If I knew what you know, I'd hang a shingle on the door across the street here, and all your patients would come to me, because I'd be kind to them. I wouldn't be a smart alec.' He was flabbergasted."

Lexi and I had a hard time imagining our sweet-tempered grandmother taking her child's doctor to task quite so forcefully -- though we knew our grandfather would have done it in a heartbeat. We wondered if she were reporting what she should have said, what she wished she had said, to this arrogant doctor, rather than the actual event. Or maybe this was simple a side of her we had never encountered. This sort of thing made the oral history project slightly dubious, but it didn't matter too much to me and Lexi -- mostly we were just glad to be there spending time with her.

We didn't have any idea it would be the last time. Over the summer her medical issues began to cascade the way they do sometimes for 85-year-olds, and by the time October rolled around it seemed like maybe she was too tired to fight her way back to health and strength -- like maybe she was ready to let go.

My mom went down last weekend, and apparently followed in the (possible) family tradition of giving the doctor what-for, until he got Grandma on a morphine drip to ease her pain, and got her an air bed so she could rest comfortably.

Grandma went into hospice on Monday. They thought she might last a few days there, but she died Tuesday morning. My aunt Debi did grandma's nails for her one last time, and all the sisters read her stories from her book of memories. She died at rest, it sounds like, surrounded by love.


We love you, Grandma. Have a good journey home.