My Last Living Grandparent Died This Summer
My grandmother, Dorothy Greist, studying at Wellsley.
My last living grandparent died in July, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, in her late nineties. My mom called to tell me, calm for the most part as it had been a long time coming and my mom doesn’t fear death like I do.
I felt sad, and I cried that day, I’m always a little on edge about death. But there was a lot separating me from my grandmother, first the fact she’d had Alzheimer’s, hadn’t been coherent for a long time. The last time I talked to her was Christmas, and she sounded ragged and hollow, hoarse, of course didn’t know who I was. Also, I was in the middle of many grandkids, lived far away, didn’t visit often, so I wasn’t much on her radar. Plus the fact I always felt like she didn’t much like kids, something I think my mom felt too, which is a way bigger deal when it’s your mother versus your grandmother. My grandmother, though nice to me, just always seemed more interested in other things; this in contrast to my dad’s mother, whom I lived with for months at a time and who thought I was the best thing in the world and let me know it every day.
Still, it’s hard to have your last grandparent die.
I think it’s really important to go to funerals, a view my family does not share. My dad’s father, whom I was extremely close to--no one thought it important that I be at his funeral and I still feel a loss for missing it. I can’t turn back time and be there, but I could go last summer for my grandma, and did.
I took the train to Connecticut from Boston where I was working. My dad picked me up at the train station and we went back to the compound, three houses and an enormous tract of land that has been in the family for generations. We stayed with my industrious aunt, who had picked all the flowers for the service and was making preparations for dinner for 50 look effortless.
We caravanned to the church, very old fashioned, prim and proper with a tall white steeple, there were a lot of people there and the funeral people in suits were treating the family special, sent everyone to a room before where I sat with my aunts and uncles and cousins whom I hadn’t seen since we were children and I kept thinking, how did everyone get so old?
My grandmother was an amazing woman. She grew up the privileged daughter of a doctor and never lived far from where she was born. Was outdoorsy and adventurous when women weren’t like that; I still remember stories of her going backpacking with babies and having to pack in and out cloth diapers. She was an accomplished clarinet player. Volunteered all over her upper crust, puritanical town. My mom was the last of five children and tells of as a child being so embarrassed that her mom would forget her at school, having more important things to do, and how her best friend was embarrassed of her mom, who always was on time because she was just a housewife. One of my favorite stories of my grandmother is about when she was traveling, this must have been sometime in the 60s, she and a girlfriend had a chance to ride a cargo plane illicitly into Tibet and they did, slept on pallets and lived on cans of beans for a few days, until they were able to be flown back out.
After the service, the extended family went back to the compound for the meal my aunt had prepared, chicken and salad and bread and drinks, cookies for dessert. I’d been told I could have my grandmother’s house if I wanted it--everyone was hoping to keep it in the family--and I walked by myself around and through it later that night. It was built by my grandparents, wood and rock, grand and still there were relics of the 60s when they last updated it, and Eames office chairs, a blue graphic print on curtains I would have loved to take home. It was warm because there’s no A/C. The house desperately needs updating but it’s got so much potential--room and views, hardwood floors and a fireplace and I remember being there a few times in my childhood: the picture from a family reunion when I was 8 with us all standing around or sitting on or in front of the mustard davenport in the living room is one of my favorites; lunch on the stone patio out back; sleeping in my mother’s childhood bedroom on hot summer nights with crickets that we didn’t have at home, and fireflies which we didn’t have either. I would love the house, but I don’t see myself in Connecticut. That goes double for my husband.
The next morning, I sat in my aunt’s lush and varied garden, she lives in the original house, the one built by my great grandparents. I talked to my mom, who was feeling tension and unappreciated by her siblings, for all she’d done for the service and for them.
After, we went with my dad to visit his brother and wife. I’ve always really admired this aunt, but she as well has always been chilly towards me. Maybe it’s an East coast thing. This visit, though, she sat close and talked with me about how she’d waited until she was older to have children, said I’m not too old, which I really needed to hear and I hadn’t thought about her being older but it made me feel better to think I could be a mom like her. We went on a boat after that, my mom and dad and I, and then to the Peabody Museum at Yale, where all my male relatives went to college. The dinosaur bones that had been there when I was a little girl--when my mom was a little girl, too--were still standing.
That night, I took the train back to Boston, the signals down all along the line, the whole northeast messed up, but still I got home. Along the way, the train stopped for fireworks, bright outside the windows. Only once the sparks faded were we allowed to move again.
