It’s just not possible to summarize a person’s life. Not for anyone, but certainly not for Helen Gage, my grandma, who lived 96 years. And I was only here, born and existing, for the last third of that.
So I can’t understand the earliest parts of her life, growing up in the jazz age of the Roaring Twenties, losing a father and a sister before her age was in the double digits. I don’t know what it meant to be a teenager during the deepest, darkest part of the Great Depression. I can’t know what it meant to marry a man and then have him and all three of his brothers (and two of hers) go off to fight a global war as the memory of the last one is still painfully recent. I don’t know what it means to inspect triscuits at the Niagara Falls Nabisco plant during a war, a process I assume is now automated. These pieces of her life are so far removed from me, from what living is in the 21st Century, that I can’t, that most of us here just can’t understand any description I might try to offer.
But although I’ve now seeded this with enough chronology to please those of you who want to remember grandma by those facts we can list, the items that are easy to document and measure … the real reason I don’t want to represent her in that way is that I don’t believe that is how she would remember her own life, what would matter the most to her.
I spent a lot of time with Grandma growing up, she wasn’t a strange relative I saw on the occasional holiday, she was someone I spent most days with, someone who was a vital part of making me who I am. I can still picture every room of her house on 98th street, the house that was hers for more than half her life. The bad color choices made on the bathroom tiles. Collecting apples from the tree in the backyard. Playing in the exciting and spongily-carpeted attic. Hiding behind the bed in the back room when her brother came to visit.
But the memories that will last with me my entire life are those that remind me of the care and time she spent with me. Teaching me and Katie to make her particular brand of incredibly thin crust cheese pizza. Rolling out the dough so sparely across the cookie sheet that little holes would need to be patched, or rather, we would try to patch them, by swirling the dough with our fingers, and then unsuccessful, would give up and move on. The pizza would still be perfect with a few little holes.
Because Grandma didn’t openly dwell on the little holes in pizza or the little holes in life. She didn’t obsess over the worst times, she looked forward to her family, and her friends. She watched the weather. She kept going, one day at a time.
She lived thirty five thousand one hundred and thirty nine days. [That’s a lot of one days at a time!] And each one of these was filled with tiny moments where she would read to us as kids, where she would make hot dogs or find a fruit by the foot, where she would check to see what color Vanna’s dress was (not on weekends), where she would do her exercises, where she would wear some exciting new dress — and then later, sweatshirt, where she would sit in the florida room to mediate, where she would slip me twenty dollars, where she would sneak something into or out of her room, where she would pick me up from school (or come rescue me because I was sick) and we would stop to run an errand on the way home and just maybe also get dairy queen, where we would play a hand of cards, or where she would show me all nine steps required to thread her 1950s sewing machine which I still have and use and carefully thread.
These little details, all the little bits of love that she gave to me were what defined her. Were, I think, what gave her life everyday.
And I’ve seen pictures, I’ve spent the last week pouring over photographs of a stylish, confident looking young woman, who raised two beautiful strong girls, who grew up and have families of their own.
I’ve been reminded of her in each decade and role, daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. And I know that all those little details of love that she showered on me, the smiles and glances and goodies and hugs, every other member of her family, all of her friends also received. I know she spent over sixty years loving people before I was even born.
She took care of all of us as much as she thought she could. And then, these last few years, was so disturbed by the idea that we now had to take care of her. She knew, that for each new one day at a time, she lost a little bit more independence, a little bit more sight, hearing, a little bit more mobility. Each day she lost the ability to do one more thing that she could once do, she lost the ability to remember one more story. My mother, somehow with infinite strength, stepped in and did as much as she could to help her, to take care of her, to make every one of these last days as wonderful and meaningful and comfortable as they could be.
And she died 96 years in to a wonderful life, in her own bed and surrounded by her family. By all those people that meant everything to her and that she gave everyday to.
The last time she saw me, the day before she died, she said it was amazing that I was there. And it was, but not because I flew some 2100 miles to get there in front of her, in our kitchen that day. It’s not amazing because of the change in technology, the progress of the world that she witnessed over nearly a century. But amazing because without her, none of us would have been there in that room, none of us would be here in this room.
To remember her best, we aren’t going to list the components of her life, but rather we should love and be there for our friends and our family. We should give them a phone call, a hug, a smile.
We should go with them on a trip to Poland.
Grandma was known for her love of Poland, and all things Polish, used not in a derogatory, but rather a loving rooted-in-our-heritage way. Occasionally, I would bring home books by Polish authors, and she would teach me how to pronounce their names, which was useful because in Polish every letter makes a sound an English speaker would never expect. So I learned names, at least how to say: Wisława Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert and Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz was a Polish poet and essayist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 2004, at the age of 93. Not quite as old as grandma, but no “spring chicken” as she might say.
I’d like to close with one of his poems, one of the many that reflects on death, and what comes after: first in my own badly-mangled Polish and then in English.
SPOTKANIE
Jechaliśmy przed świtem po zamarzłych polach,
Czerwone skrzydło wstawało, jeszcze noc.
I zając przebiegł nagle tuż przed nami,
A jeden z nas pokazał go ręką.
To było dawno. Dzisiaj już nie żyją
Ni zając, ani ten co go wskazywał.
Miłości moja, gdzież są, dokąd idą
Błysk ręki, linia biegu, szelest grud —
Nie z żalu pytam, ale z zamyślenia.
ENCOUNTER
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
Goodbye Grandma,
We will miss you,
We will wonder after you,
We love you.
Patrick Gage Kelley
December 29, 2015
