In Memoriam

On June 12th, my grandmother, Mary Bogart, passed away.  She would have been 100 on September 20th of this year, and we’re planning to be in New Mexico on that day for a family gathering and memorial service. When our first child was born, he had six great grandparents, all but my father’s parents who passed away my senior year in high school, and now our boys have only their great grandmother, my father-in-law’s mother.  I am so grateful they will have memories of all these people.  It also means that we’ve had more funerals in the last five years than in any other period in my life.  It doesn’t seem to get any easier. My mother asked me several weeks ago to write something for the collection of memories of my grandmother that she’s putting together.  This is what I came up with:

This is hard to write.  Maybe because if I were trying to describe Grandma to somebody who had never met her, I would start with the story of bringing home a report card in middle school that had five A+s and one A, and showing it to her and being asked “So why isn’t there a plus next to this one?”  And maybe that would make it sound like she was tougher than she was.  Because I never doubted that she loved me, and in the question about why there wasn’t the plus was the faith she had in me, that I could do anything.  And that was a gift.  When I tell people about my grandmother I describe coming to visit her in her 90′s and there being an algebra book lying on the table, about her practicing the piano into her 70′s, not because she was going to be hitting Carnegie Hall but because it meant something to her.  I tell people that what I learned from her about living a long and happy life was staying active, keeping your mind stimulated, holding to faith, being of service to others.  That what I learned from her was that love can be expressed in quiet actions, the baking of birthday cakes and taking of walks, as clearly as it is in lots of words.  And yes, she was a tough woman, which has helped me to understand that I can be tough when I need to be, that it’s better sometimes to meet adversity with pragmatism and action than with self-pity, but that that toughness is not exclusive of lovingness.  And maybe the thing I would then describe to someone who had never met my grandmother, if I could keep it together, is the gift that came with her slow decline in the last few years of that toughness falling away a little, and how when I last visited New Mexico, we didn’t exchange a lot of words, even though there are a lot of questions I would have loved to have asked her but never did, but I sat and held her hand before leaving and when I got up to go there were tears in both of our eyes, and that there was something there that neither she nor I had the words to express, but it was expressed anyway.