Mother's Day

When I moved my grandmother into a nursing home in January 2019 I knew it would be the last time I moved her, so I wasn't surprised when I got the phone call that she was dead. She died in her sleep, in her own bed and pajamas, as opposed to a hospital gown with tubes down her throat and for that I am thankful. She was 97--she had a good run and was remarkably sharp until the last 12-18 months of her life. Unfortunately I wasn't able to give her the send-off she deserved. I'd appreciate it if you would let me do so here.

Janet was a force of nature 45 years ago. You know what I mean if you've ever lived in a home where your grandmother was the head of the household. She was the sole breadwinner for her, her daughter, her mother and her grandson. We moved in when my parents divorced, I was about 12 months old so my earliest memories are from living with her. Sometimes she was my grandmother, spoiling me. Other times she was a second mother, settling disputes between my mother and me. Not infrequently she was like a father, explaining the rules of baseball, taking me fishing and showing me how to fix a leaky faucet. She did it all.

She was a proud card-carrying member of the Telephone Pioneers of America, a non-profit volunteer society of telecommunications workers. I mean literally card-carrying, I just pulled this out of her wallet:

She was also a proud union member. In addition to a meager pension, the union provided preposterous health insurance, picking up whatever Medicare didn't except for a $50 yearly deductible. You can see why some folks don't want universal healthcare, they practically have it already.

Janet was also a proud Democrat. She never voted for a Republican ever "because of FDR." I can't imagine any presidents of my lifetime inspiring this much loyalty 75 years after their death. They don't make 'em like they used to.

She, perhaps unsurprisingly, hated Donald Trump, so I found it tremendously ironic that on the day she died she received a letter from him notifying her that she received a $1200 stimulus check.

She was progressive too, probably from living in Hackensack and Teaneck her entire life. I remember her saying to me "You know what my problem is with Jim McGreevey?" and holding my breath for the next sentence, which was "I don't care that he's a gay, I just don't like that he lied to his wife for all these years." I realize that "gay" should be used as an adjective and not a noun, but at the time she was an 85-year-old woman with a high school education and the spirit of her words are what count.

Along similar lines, she once asked me "Do you still work for that Chinaman?" I told her "No, I don't work for Dr. Kuo anymore, but more importantly you shouldn't call him a Chinaman. He's Asian." Miffed, she retorted "If he was from England I'd call him an Englishman. If he was from France I'd call him a Frenchman. If he was Dutch I'd call him a Dutchman. He's from China so I call him a Chinaman." You can't teach an old Jersey girl new terminology.

Remarkably, she and my mother lived together for all but about 12 years of my mother's life, and she only lived in two different houses for the first 95 years of her life. When my mother had a stroke in May 2018 I had to move my grandmother to assisted living and she went downhill quickly. It killed me but there was nothing else I could do. Eight months later she had to be in a nursing home and luckily I live around the corner from an excellent one. It was the second-to-last nursing home in New Jersey to have a covid-19 infection. As soon as it happened I braced for the worst. She died about three weeks later.

I don't blame the virus. She was too strong to fall to that nonsense. The death certificate says heart failure, which is plausible, but I don't see anyone using a precious covid-19 test on a 97-year-old corpse so who knows if she had it. I think it was loneliness that killed her. Starting March 6, the state banned all visitors from nursing homes. As a result she couldn't see my mother, and being apart from her after being together for so long was too much to bear. That's what I think at least.

This is the worst part for me. I didn't see her for the last two-plus months of her life. She had friends in there and the staff provided tremendous care, but they can't replace time with family. Her hearing and vision were too bad to FaceTime. The one time I tried she said "Who the hell is that and why is he waving at me? Give this to someone else so he can wave at them." I feel like she died alone.

It took eight days for the funeral home to have an opening for her service. That's a really long time. The days run together as it is, but it was hard to pass time while grieving. I wanted closure badly. And the service was limited to not more than eight people in the room at a time. We ended up not inviting anyone so the service was just an hour for my mother and me to say goodbye to her. I ended up hugging my mom a lot, I knew I shouldn't but I had to, watching her sob in an otherwise empty room.

Then we got in the same car (she and her husband rode in the back seat, albeit less than 6 feet away from me) and followed the hearse to Hillside Cemetery in Cortlandt, New York. My great-great-great-great (maybe a few more or less greats than that) grandfather bought two dozen plots back in the mid 1800's. You can read about him and the rest of the crew here. My grandmother's family settled that part of New York about 400 years ago and we used to go up there to visit my Uncle Irv. He's buried there along with my great-grandmother and now Janet too. I never understood why she wanted to be buried so far away, where it would be hard to visit her, but I got it once was started driving. She got one last drive up the Palisades Parkway, along the Hudson River and over the Bear Mountain Bridge. It was a bright clear day, perfect for one final trip to the old ancestral home.

I'm writing this more for myself than anything else. I'm not looking for condolences or attaboys. I just wanted to give Gram a better farewell.