How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy, Mr. Death?

My grandmother died. She was 91, and she'd been sinking into oblivion for months now, a gradual decline from three years ago when she broke her hip. She had a good life, a long life, and until the hip, she had a great time. After the hip broke, she did not have a good time. She was frightened of dying and just aware enough of how her faculties were slipping to be upset by it. She would mumble and then get agitated that she couldn't make herself understood. I saw her in October, a frail, tiny shrunken woman, and it was the first time I'm not sure she recognized who I was.

Last Christmas I went to see her and her face lit up when I came in the door. She was already into good days and bad days by this point, but this was a good one. We sang Christmas Carols with the man who'd come to play piano for them. When we chatted, she asked how Chicago was. I told the nurse she'd been a beauty queen (Miss Marion 1933) and she got this impish look in her eye and said, "You know why I won? Dresses back then had a shift under them, and I went out in just the shift." So apparently Grandma was sporting the slip dress way back in the day. As I left that day, the nurse said, "You must be a favorite of hers, the way she lit up when you came in." I said, "Well, she's certainly a favorite of mine."

The funeral was Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I know she was older, that she was in poor health, that we knew she was nearing the end, but it was still sad. Good, but sad. I got to be a pallbearer, which felt helpful. A death touches you differently when you help carry the body. My grandmother had asked that all the grandchildren be pallbearers. It just so happened I was the only girl (some of my cousins couldn't be there), and I'd like to think my Grandma would have liked that.

During the service, which was exceptionally simple and short, the minister talked about something I knew but had never thought about. My grandmother was christened, confirmed, married, had all her children confirmed, and was buried from the same church. The pall we used over her coffin had been bought for the church as a memorial for my grandfather's funeral nearly twenty five years before. It was a deep moment, the passing of this woman, and we lost a connection to all that has gone before.

I am glad for my grandma's sake that she has gone. No matter what I (or you) may think of an afterlife, she was by the last few months merely suffering, not living at all. But I am surprised to find I really miss her, now that I know I can't ever see her again. I am not sure how well I knew her, as of course I missed a lot of her life, but I liked her. I did love her, but more than that, I genuinely liked her. She was spunky and feisty and enjoyed her life. She wasn't afraid of love or work or pain. The gentleman who took her to the hospital when she was having a stroke (a close friend) told me she said to him, "I never cry, but I feel like crying now," and when he told her to go ahead, she just sobbed. I don't like to think of her that scared, but I love that she held on without giving in as long as possible, and I am so grateful her friend was with her when she couldn't hold it back.

She was a flirt, from first to last. She married my grandfather, the story goes, because he was the first man to tell her no. She called him to break a date - a bandleader had asked her to a dance, and she always loved to go out with that bandleader because while he was directing the band, she could dance with everyone else. My grandfather told her that if she broke the date, it was their last. One of her nurses from her nursing home came to the funeral and told us she used to flirt with this nurse's husband, then wink, point to the nurse, and say, "Don't tell her."

I loved doing things she enjoyed because she was fun to watch when she was happy. I wish I'd been older a little sooner, but as I got to driving age I would go over to see her and take her out to lunch - by then she was carless, so I was "springing" her, I'd say. Once, she let me take her to visit her old friends, and it was one of the happiest days of my life to watch her chat and flirt and show up unexpectedly on friends' doorsteps. Her best friend came to the door and was so thrilled and delighted to see her I think they both had tears in their eyes. "Oh, Libby," she sighed, "the bridge club just isn't the same without you."

I was her namesake. I'm Elizabeth after her, though she was always called Libby. I had her car for a few years, too, which I named after her mother: Inez. On the way to the gravesite I was sitting next to my nephew, Ward, who is named after my grandfather, Edward, and I realized we were next to each other the way they would be soon. It was a graveyard full of the names of the attendees.

It's odd enough that she's really gone. But strange things will bring her back to me, little slivers of memory that I thought I'd lost, and then I tear up. Thanksgiving, 1999, My sister-in-law and I went over to pick her up to drive her to our house, and she was thrilled we were there because she thought she'd just be stranded for the holiday. (She had been told someone would pick her up, but she got confused.) I remember knocking on the door several times before she heard us, and being frightened something had happened to her. Then she was so happy we'd come, and we were so happy she was fine, and I can remember her standing on the red carpet in the dining room telling us she'd just be a minute getting ready. The dining room, in the midst of her tea cup collection and in view of her kitchen, where she made blueberry pies (huckleberry pies, really) and fed us Froot Loops as children and drank copious amounts of blush wine and hosted Thanksgiving feasts for thirty, maybe fourty years.

She hasn't lived in that house for 8 years, and much of her left this earth months or even years ago, but I miss her. The only consolation I can think of is that it's better to miss her than not to have appreciated her, for we all find the dirt farm eventually. At least she remains as she can, feisty flirt that she is, sharp and happy in my memory, with that mischevious twinkle firmly glittering in her eye.

Goodbye, Libby.