the_rck

I've been thinking about what I know about my grandmother's life and what I remember about her. I feel like it's not as much as it ought to be given how long she was part of my life.

I know she was born in England, came to the US when she was 7 or 8, and later became a US citizen. I used to know where she was born, but I've forgotten. I think it was somewhere moderately urban but not all that close to London, but I might be entirely wrong on all counts. Looking at a map didn't produce any aha! moments.

Her father died of flu before she was born. I'm not sure how long before. I also have no idea whether or not everything her mother told us about him was true. Grandma and her mother lived with her mother's parents and sisters during the time Grandma remembered.

There was a story about Grandma as a newborn with someone-- her uncle or her grandfather or some such-- carrying her to the doctor on a bicycle. They put her in a shoebox for the trip.

She first came to the US because her mother's aunt and uncle wanted children and hadn't been able to have any. There was some unpleasantness that Great-Grandma elided in telling the story because the aunt and uncle only wanted Grandma and made her mother as uncomfortable and unwelcome as possible. I think the two of them went back to England at least once.

Somewhere in there, Great-Grandma met a man from Detroit who she eventually married. I don't think he officially adopted Grandma (she didn't change her name), but she called him Dad. Grandma had three younger siblings born after the marriage, all more than ten years younger than she was. The youngest, her only sister, is still alive and is much closer to my father's age than to Grandma's.

Grandma married my grandfather at 17. I think they rushed things because he was going into the Army. He didn't make it through training before the war ended, but he always talked about how Army discipline turned boys into men. My father was born in (I think) 1947. It could have been 1948. (Mostly, I know that he's a year younger than my mother and that she was born after the war ended.)

They had three children; my uncle is at least a decade younger than my father, but I'm not sure of the exact ages.

Grandpa built a house for them in Livonia in the late 50s or early 60s. He built it solidly, but he also didn't really know what he was doing, so the house didn't breathe at all. They had to install AC at great expense because otherwise the air was bad enough to make all of them sick. (My mother was very judgy about this, using it as an example of why Grandpa should be regarded as overbearing and controlling. He was both, but I'm not actually sure that over-insulating can be taken as evidence of that.)

Grandpa worked for Ma Bell as a line technician. He was a self-taught engineer, and he resented the fact that younger men who had degrees got promoted over him. His work is probably what killed him in the end because the cancer started as skin cancer that got into his lymph nodes. I remember him as always having bad sunburns while he was still working.

I was about 8 (and my sister about 7) when Grandpa had a massive heart attack and had to retire. They sold the house and moved to a condo for a couple of years. They moved to Florida a few years later and then back to Michigan again some time while I was in college.

Grandma ended up managing Grandpa's diet and medications and exercise. It was a power shift in their relationship that made him less likely to berate people for not already knowing the rules to pinochle (neither my sister nor I can play cards because of him 'teaching' us. We panic) or for shutting a car door too lightly or too hard. He still wanted to have everything 'right;' he just had less energy for being unpleasant, and Grandma was more likely to remind him that he shouldn't stress himself.

He lived until the year I turned 30. He'd had more than one additional heart attack in the intervening years, but it was brain cancer that got him.

My aunt never had children. My uncle had two sons, twelve and fourteen years younger than I am, and later adopted his granddaughter who was born when both her biological parents were still in high school.

Grandma adored all six of us (my half-sister is 23 years younger than I am). She also adored all of her great-grandchildren. She kept a closet of toys for when the great-grandkids came to visit.

My great-grandmother passed away some time after Scott and I got married. Only a year or two, I think. I remember going up to visit her shortly before the wedding and Grandma regretting that I didn't yet have my dress and therefore couldn't model it for Great-Grandma.

Grandma collected figurines, Hummel, Royal Doulton, whatever she saw and liked, for a while but downsized the collection every time they moved. She asked me to name one of those that I wanted to get after she was gone, and she put a post-it on the back of it with my name.

I asked for the Royal Doulton figurine of a seated old woman selling balloons because that's the one I remember most clearly from looking at her collection when I was very small. Looking for a clear picture online makes it clear to me that I don't remember the details well. There seem to be several versions with slightly different faces and color combinations. They're also all either on Pinterest or offered by stores that will take the image down after the figurine sells. I don't recall if she ever owned the paired old man selling balloons. If she did, I think she gave it up before one of her moves.

If I get it, I will treasure it. If I don't, it won't bother me much. My aunt and uncle up there are both ill. If selling it or putting it in a box for dealing with later makes things easier for them, I'd rather they do that. Shipping anything right now isn't feasible, and this should be low on their priority list.

Grandma loved to read, especially romances. I didn't see books around the house until after Grandpa was gone. I don't know if she didn't read before that or if she kept it out of sight. During the last few years she was living alone, she had a big lens with a light so that she could use that to make large print books legible. She didn't like audiobooks much because she didn't know how to handle CDs and because tapes were awkward for her. Also, she didn't have any way to browse without assistance and really didn't want to impose (even on the librarians whose job it was).

When she passed away, she hadn't been able to read at all for many years. She and her mother both lost their sight to macular degeneration.

She and her mother (and now my father) had the essential tremors that give me so much trouble. The onset of my issues was much earlier than for anyone else in the family, but that's clearly where it came from.

She took me and my sister to see the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie and told us after that he was 'a very nice looking young man.' My aunt later translated that as 'a hunk.'

Grandma didn't like talking on the phone very much even before it became physically exhausting. She fretted about the cost of long distance calls because Grandpa's free phone service from Ma Bell had always meant that distant relatives called just long enough to ask that one of them call back. This was one of the benefits they lost when Ma Bell broke up.

She was good at managing money. I don't think she ever understood how my father could possibly be so bad at it. She put her money into a trust not long after Grandpa died, mostly because she wanted to be sure there was enough to take care of her daughter who had brain damage from meningitis (this happened after Scott and I got married but before we bought our house).

There never was a lot, and I expect that, at this point, if there's anything left, it will go to my uncle and his wife to help with their medical and living expenses. They're both ill, and the granddaughter they adopted is college age, so I'd also be entirely happy seeing anything Grandma left go toward that cousin's education.

I have no idea how much went toward paying for Grandma's months in a care facility, though, so there may be very little. My aunt passed away last November, so providing for her stopped being an ongoing concern, and my uncle may have chosen to spend the trust money on Grandma once it was clear that he and his wife were too ill to manage her care.

At least, I hope any leftover money goes to my uncle. I don't want to see my father get any of it unless someone else controls it because whatever money he gets always evaporates rapidly without any lasting benefit. Of course, I think the trust owns the house where he and his wife now live. Grandma didn't say that she was worried about him not having anywhere to live, but I think that was a factor. None of us really expected his current marriage to last because none of the previous four did, and he didn't seem likely to keep a house through a divorce settlement.

Grandma told us all repeatedly that, "This growing old thing is not for sissies!" She always laughed when she said it, but it was an admission that it was all very hard. Natural and to be expected but also really, really difficult.

She used to love taking long walks. As she got older and frailer, she didn't try to go as far, but for a while, she had a friend from church who would pick her up a couple of times a week to drive to a safe place to walk indoors. I know she walked the Mackinaw Bridge at least once during one of the big events that closed the bridge to vehicles specifically so that people could walk it. She wanted to do it again, but she was never robust enough to try it a second time.

She liked the condo she and Grandpa bought in East Tawas because it was only three blocks from a public access beach and pier. I think that had more to do with her thinking that access to Lake Huron gave visitors something to do, both an enticement to visit and a reason for energetic children to take that energy elsewhere for a while.

She still needed a car to get groceries, so her losing her license due to declining eyesight was a sign that she wouldn't be able to live alone much longer. For a while, my cousin's wife took her shopping a couple of times a week which let Grandma see those two great-grandchildren and gave my cousin's wife an additional adult to keep track of the kids. (Those two are only ten months apart, so their toddler years were challenging for everybody involved.)

The condo had two stories with the shower and laundry upstairs and no good way to move either one downstairs. My uncle renovated a space in his house for Grandma to move into a bit before she got to the point of not being able to manage on her own.

Before Grandpa's first heart attack, they used to host Christmas Eve gatherings for the extended family. Her siblings and their kids attended more reliably than his did, but having it on Christmas Eve opened up options for families to visit other relatives on Christmas Day. Grandma always made meatballs; my mother always made cheesecake.

Grandma was always a meat and potatoes, salt and pepper only sort of cook. That was also the sort of food that she sought when she ate out. The focus was more on having enough than on having it be interesting/exciting.

I remember her and her sister and her mother arguing about who was going to pick up the check for a meal out (the three of them and at least four kids, possibly as many as six). Grandma won in the end because she'd persuaded them to go to 'her club' (I'm not sure what sort of club this was. Possibly some sort of golf course related country club. I can't have been older than 8, so it didn't occur to me to wonder) which meant that she'd be billed at the end of the month. Great-grandma and Aunt Mary wouldn't have access to the bill.

I suspect, now, that a big part of that was her wanting to prove that she and Grandpa could afford such things.

She taught me how to drive a golf cart during a summer visit to their house in Florida. I wasn't very good at it, but she wanted to compensate for me not being able to use the pool due to 'monthlies' by letting me do something else that I wouldn't ordinarily be able to do. That house was in a retirement community that was constructed with a golf course around it and the clubhouse with the pool at the center. She and Grandpa used to play every day when they didn't have guests.

So far as I know, she never played again after Grandpa died. I don't know if it was too much, physically (she was in her 70s), if she missed him too much when she tried to play, or if it was something she had only enjoyed because he did it with her.

She kept playing bridge and pinochle after Grandpa died, up until she couldn't see well enough to manage. I think she gradually shifted into a different group of acquaintances for that because she mentioned that all of them were 'widow ladies.' She also said that the members of the group helped each other out as a support group for inconveniently timed bouts of grief.

She liked an occasional whiskey sour, and I remember her always having tonic water in the fridge before Grandpa died. I don't think that she was ever a beer or wine drinker, but I also might not have seen it.

Grandma liked buying clothes for me and my sister (probably also for our half-sister, but the age gap and the geographical distance mean I wasn't there to see it). I think she'd have liked buying us jewelry, makeup, etc. if either of us had been interested, or, at least, she'd have liked taking us shopping for such items.

When I graduated high school, she and Grandpa gave me some soft luggage. A couple of those bags are still in service with us now. The ones I used most disintegrated from the inside out; I'm not sure if it was overuse or if it was misuse (wet towels, perhaps, or improperly sealed bottles of shampoo or even just overstuffing them with books).

The year I turned 16 was Grandma and Grandpa's 40th anniversary, a big round number, anyway, and my aunt and my uncle and his wife planned a surprise party. We lived on the other side of the state then, and my sister and I had been trading weeks with our two sets of grandparents during that summer. I was supposed to go home before the party while my sister stayed on with Grandma and Grandpa, but my other grandparents let me stay extra time (they were thrilled) with them so that I'd be able to attend.

They had a smaller celebration for their 50th which I didn't attend because they scheduled it on top of my wedding so as to have my father, his then wife, and their daughter there. I think my father was the only one who expected me to go. We were moving that weekend as well as getting married, and we both had to be back at work on Monday.

Of course, my father also wanted us to delay our wedding a bit more than a week in order to get married on his parents' 50th anniversary. He suggested this at about a month out from our scheduled date. He also appointed my three year old sister as a flower girl even though we hadn't planned for her to be. (She did not enjoy the experience at all and cried through being coaxed down the aisle by our father. Too many strangers all looking at her, too much noise, and being three years old in a new place is not a winning combination.)

I think that Grandma found Scott a relief compared to her fears about who I might date/marry. She never said that, but she told me several times that I had a good man. She and Grandpa got along really well with Scott's parents, to the point that Scott's parents would drop by when they were in the area. I'm not sure if the four of them ever played golf together, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I had always assumed that, when Grandma died, Scott's parents would drive me up for the funeral if Scott couldn't get the necessary time off. I'm pretty sure that they would have if there were any sort of service. I'm also fairly sure that they don't 100% understand why my uncle and his family have decided against having any sort of service. The no service thing is mostly due to the pandemic, but it also takes a huge burden off of my aunt and uncle. They would harm themselves to do it 'right.'

Maybe we'll have a memorial next year. Maybe we won't. It's possible that neither my aunt nor my uncle will still be with us then. My uncle's been in the could-go-any-time category for about three years now.