This is one of my favorite photos of my grandmother, taken in her Florida home when I visited her with my family to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. It captures a lot of details about her: the way she absently plays with whatever’s on the table; the way she crosses her long, strong legs so that the one underneath slides back or to the side; the bottle of vodka (a birthday gift) representing her ritualistic evening screwdriver; even her lack of shame about her body, in the way the nightgown is hiked up over her knees. The photo was taken long after she began to go blind, which has been a difficult struggle for the woman who voraciously read Danielle Steele and Catherine Coulter.
Yesterday, she turned ninety-six, and on the phone she told me, “I’m really bad today, I’m just about ready to end it.” Such expressions are not uncommon - I have childhood memories of her telling me God could take her any day, that she was ready. This time, however, she really stressed it, and I felt the abrupt, eerie realization that she might be right. She said, “I just want you to know how much I love you and how much it means to me that you called, in case this is the last time we speak. I think you’re just the best granddaughter in the whole world.” (Grandma is also a big fan of hyperbole.)
As she asked me the usual questions about my intentions with Fred and recommended a cure for my menstrual cramps (“Just get pregnant!”), she revisited the familiar anecdotes about how she and my grandfather only had sixty-eight cents in their pockets when they got married. She was eighteen and longing to escape her parents, so she proposed to him on their second date. Yesterday, she added a few new details: I learned that she never had an engagement ring (too expensive) and that her platinum wedding band had cost $7.00. “I’ve never taken it off in seventy years,” she said. Her wedding dress, for that matter, cost $7.99. Grandma was always frugal, sometimes to a nearly obsessive extreme. When I stayed overnight at her house as a kid, the morning entertainment always included watching The Price is Right.
In recent years, I’ve started to notice which stories she tells me the most often, interpreting these to be the most significant or definitive in her memory and sense of identity. Most of them revolve around how she and her husband managed to budget in a way that included a weekly trip to the movies for twenty cents, and still saved enough that even after raising four children they were able to buy a buy a snowbird condominium in Florida. Yesterday, though, she mentioned her will several times, and how she hasn’t wanted to go into a nursing home so that she could save most of her money and leave it to her family. (Yes: she is 96, blind, and still lives alone, with visits from a woman who helps clean and prepare her meals for minimal compensation. In fact, she still walks down to the community pool every day with a neighbor and swims laps.)
What she emphasized to me during this birthday conversation was how happy she had been with her husband, and how she doesn’t regret a thing. She needed to remember, and for me to remember, above all, her happiness. Knowing that her children seemed to have different memories of that life on Sumner Street in Detroit, I wondered if this perspective was more a product of age or personality; did my grandmother’s attitude of persistence and determination support this selective interpretation of her life, or do extra years provide a natural padding for our memories, a biological “retirement present” for our psyches?
We shared a moment of humor when the conversation topic shifted to Thanksgiving (after she repeated how lucky Fred and his family are to have me in their lives and how I should tell Fred this). She asked me whether I eat turkey, and when I said no, the response was “You still don’t, huh.” She then confessed that once when visiting my parents, she had made pea soup from a boiled ham bone and told me there was no meat in it. “I shouldn’t have done that, should I… but it didn’t hurt you, did it? You loved that soup! Hah, hah, hah.” When I told her that I was interested in learning to make the traditional German family dinner of “meat dumplings,” she was ecstatic, but insisted that if I made them I must eat one.
Toward the end of the conversation, she repeated how it meant the world to her that I called, but that she didn’t want me to come to her funeral. She protested that it wouldn’t make sense to spend that money just to come to her funeral, and that I should buy something for myself instead and think of it as from her. As I thought about it, I realized that in a way, she was right - if I wanted to buy a plane ticket to Florida, it should be while she’s alive, not after she’s gone.
As she ended the call (“I don’t want to run up your phone bill!”) and again mentioned the things she wanted me to know in case it was the last conversation we ever had, I felt panicky. Though her presence in my adult life has been minimal, her influence has been constant. Hanging up the phone, I felt both warm and hollow. I resolved to call her again soon, and often - but at the same time, I had to accept that her passing would inevitably interrupt my plans, whether in days or years.
