Circle of Life
I’ve put off making this entry for a while, for what will likely be obvious reasons. On Wednesday of last week (March 15), Gordon’s first child, Zoe Tamsin Van Gelder, came into the world, and my paternal grandmother, Eleanore T. Adams, left it.
She was 85 and in poor health, so it didn’t come as a huge surprise, but no matter how much you think you’re prepared for something like that to happen, it always seems to hit you just as hard as if it had come with no warning. I was actually in Manhattan at KGB for the Fantastic Fiction reading when I got a call from the hospital telling me my grandmother was dying. I left right away to head back to NJ, but even as I rushed out of there, I knew I would be too late. And I was, though I got in touch with some cousins who were able to make it over there for her final moments. She wasn’t conscious before the end, so my being there couldn’t have comforted her. But still.
We held the wake on Sunday, and she was buried on Monday.
My grandmother and I were very close. When I was young, my family and I lived in the upper half of a two family home built by my great-grandfather (my grandmother’s father), while my grandparents lived downstairs. Both my parents worked, so after school, I’d come home and my grandmother would babysit me. I remember sitting in her living room watching Nickelodeon, especially You Can’t Do That on Television, and my grandmother bringing me snacks. She’d always bring me cheese and crackers–the crackers varied, but the cheese was always that spreadable sharp cheese that goes on like cream cheese.
My grandmother liked to reminisce about the past, and one of the stories she liked to tell, she told so often, I can’t be sure if I actually remember it, or if I’ve just heard the story so many times it’s imprinted itself on my memory. Here’s the story:
When I was a toddler, my grandmother was babysitting me. She went out onto the back porch to hang some clothes on the clothesline, and when she was out there, I ran over to the screen door and hooked the latch, locking her out. She can’t get back in the house, and I’m inside doing God knows what. She can’t see me from the porch, so she’s calling out “John! John! Where are you?” She doesn’t know what to do, so she tells the neighbors what happened, and one of them says to cut the screen and unlock the door that way. So she does. And when she gets inside, she finds me in one of the bedrooms, in the corner, laughing my ass off.
The story usually ended with her saying, and looking genuinely surprised as she says it, “Can you imagine that?” then adding, “That little stinker.”
My dad died when I was eight, and we moved out of my grandparents’ house shortly after that. So she took care of me a lot during those formative years. About a year after moving out, we moved away to Florida, so I didn’t see much of her, though she and my grandfather would make the trip down to Florida (by car!) every year to spend some time with me, then would go vacation at some resort in the Tampa area and play shuffleboard. When I moved back to New Jersey in 2001, it was because I wanted to get a job in publishing, but also because I knew my grandparents needed someone to help out. At first, they didn’t need very much, but as the years progressed, the two of them required more and more help, and they came to rely on me for pretty much everything. So as she took care of me in my first years of life, I took care of her in her final years.
The last few months, she’d been through a lot. She was suffering from terrible, crippling arthritis, and she was battling with cancer on and off for a about a year and a half. A few weeks ago, she had a small stroke, and became all but unable to walk. After a brief hospital stay, she was transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation, and once she got there, the doctors and physical therapists concluded that she’d have to stay in a home, or get full time nursing care. So her final days were rather trying, and I know she couldn’t have been happy, so perhaps it’s a good thing that she passed before things got any worse for her.
I’ll miss her.