When I was in college I first experienced my grandparent dying. I wasn’t there at home, I was in Boston and they were back home in Philadelphia for the first one, my mother’s father. I got calls when they died, like for a birthday. My mother’s father. My father’s father had died about 10 years before I was born, of a brain abscess, which would have been readily cured today, but at that pre-antibiotic time wasn’t. So I never knew him. But I did know Grandpop, by mother’s father, a thin man who had a great sense of humor but who seemed pretty sad, as I would have been if I had been living life with my grandmother. Frail, when we knew him, smoking a lot of Pall Mall’s until he finally had to stop as his heart failed and we kids teased him as he sat with his hunger for a cigarette and he rebuked us, saying to us directly, you have no idea how hard it is. His index finger was tobacco stained. Anyway, I got the call in my junior or senior year and, worldly man that I was by then, I simply arranged a flight and took it, and my roommate Ken took the call from my parents asking for my plans and that’s how they found out that I was on the way. I figured they were impressed with my sophistication – I certainly was.
We were at the cemetery and my grandmother threw a handful of dirt on top of his casket and cried and reached out to him as it was lowered and my mother and someone else on her other side pulled her back, as it look like she was going to go down and pull him back. It was like a set piece, like “hold me back or I’ll hit him.” I was struck by it, acting the piece. I never saw her so attaching to him in life, so I was actually surprised.
Then my father’s mother and my mother’s mother – I did visit my father’s mother in the hospital, I remember, and was shocked as she fidgeted in the bed and I got an unwelcome glimpse of her bottom and turned away. She was 72 years old, and seemed very old and irritable. Impending death seemed very strange. I didn’t know much about what to do, but she seemed to like having me there. She talked to me. I really didn’t know much what to say. I was well out of college then, because I remember that Nana – my father’s mother – visited us in our new Berkeley house and Mary Jane, my first wife, was pissed when Nana questioned 3 or 4 year old Allie about something and caught him in a lie. So by that time I was in my 30’s. Nana was a piece of work.
By the way, I’m getting sick of having to use the English designation of grandparents – it’s so much easier in Swedish. In Swedish, “mor” is mother, and “far” is father. So the two grandmothers are “mormor” and “farmor” – so much simpler.
Anyway, my maternal grandmother died herself in turn, I regret to say I’m not really sure when – it maight have been a couple of years earlier, because I think I was on my year in Sweden when I got the call from my parents, who followed me via the baby sitter to where we were in a dinner party at new Swedish friends, and they kept me on the phone for an uncomfortably long time. No cell phones. When she was in the hospital my mother visited her, but she kind of sniggered when she said that when she visited her, she couldn’t wait to leave. My mother didn’t like her parents much. When they took the train to Florida for a few weeks in the winter and my mother was living at home with them, she loved it when they left and she was kept in the hosue with Carrie, the maid, nominally in charge. She called the kids “Doctor Sidney” and “Miss Renee.” When she got cancer she left her little maid’s room off the kitchen in my tiny grandparents two story semidetached house in West Philly to “be with her own people.” I recoiled just listening to my grandfather saying that.
Then there were might great aunts – mormor’s sisters Bea and Sadye. I saw Bea when I came to see her in the hospital, probably the Graduate Hospital at 19th and Lombard Street. She was a pretentious socialite who I loved and who loved us, whom my friend Ed Packel nicknamed “Wide Zorch” because of her corpulence, and she loved having a nickname. She would pimp us to call her that, “What is that you call me?” “Wide Zorch!” “I’ll Zorch you!” Ha ha ha. When I got to the hospital I didn’t make it to her room, because instead I saw her on a gurney headed toward the elevator to go down for a test, and she saw me and yelled out “Buddy!” There was something so reassuring to her that I was there. After all, even though my father resented her pretentiousness, we kids and Bea really loved each other. I never saw her again.
For years she lived with her younger sister Sadye, who lasted until 96 years of age, I think. I remember one night at our house when I was taking a bubble bath with my brother Bobby, and my mother and Sadye were there doing the honors of soaping us down. I looked at Mom and her aunt and I said, confusedly, Which one of you is older? They looked at each other and sweet-tempered Sadye laughed a little, flattered, and said “Who do you think?” I think that was the time Bobby and I took the suds as we were standing us an put them on our chest – I guess I did it and Bobby followed – and pretended they were breasts. Sadye looked at Mom and said, They’re just noticing those things. One time we asked her why she spelled her name with a “y” and she said she had done that to be fancy. Sadye, who used to play cards with us with enthusiasm and patience, was close friends with her next door neighbor in the Rittenhouse Plaza Apartments, but then Norma died and all Sadye had left was Gertrude, their longtime maid. Finally, with so many buried, Sadye asked me, now a doctor, Is there a pill? She had lived too long. I remember the funeral. We gathered there in a small group, some people said something, and my father added his ungraceful comment, displaying his long experience with death (his professional phone number was GA6-5050, which he said was appropriate because that was generally your odds when you come to me) stood up and said, well, this happens, and I guess I’m next. Jesus, who needed that. Also, I think it turned out to be untrue because my cousin Peggy contracted salivary gland cancer, I think, and died from it. But not before going bungee jumping – what is there to lose, she figured. She was a gutsy lady, Peggy. At the funeral Gertrude stood up and told how Sadye was having a normal day but then she stood up and said something and then just fell down as she died on the spot. Just like that, said Gertrude. Good old Gertrude. A good cook.
I remember them so well. When we kids get together we’ll talk about them. Indelible. Such intense memories. Such personalities. Never stop missing them all.
Budd Shenkin
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