A Requiem for Frances
My grandmother died last week. She was four months shy of her 98th birthday. She was born in 1910, at the tail end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was born a subject of Franz Josef. Had Franz Josef been an immigrant and passed through Ellis Island, he would have undergone a spelling change. His name would have been Francis Joseph. Had the immigrant Franz Josef coughed or cleared his throat after uttering his family name at Ellis Island, he would have been Francis Josepher.
My grandmother’s name was Frances Josepher. Well, eventually. She married into the Josepher family. She spent her life in New York City. She gave birth to two children. She lost a child. She raised a family. She opened her home to her aging parents.
Franz Josef lost a child too, his son allegedly from suicide. Josef also lost his wife, who was stabbed to death by an anarchist in that era of anarchy-inspired assassination.
My grandmother lost her husband in the mid-1970s to brain cancer. The death of her “beloved Paul,” as she always referred to him, created a chasm for my grandmother. My grandmother, like the women of her era, went from being a daughter to being a wife. Suddenly, she was a widow. Suddenly, she was the only person sleeping under her roof.
My grandmother went to work. She was a bookkeeper by training. She knew how to use an abacus. She found a job south of the southern edge of Central Park. The job gave her freedom, independence. She had a second life of sorts.
There was no escaping the presence of her “beloved Paul” but my grandmother came to realize something remarkable. She could build on that. The Death of Paul wasn’t an end for her. It wasn’t a beginning either. It was a step in another direction.
The computer generation revolutionized bookkeeping and my grandmother was phased out. She retired. She grieved the loss of her job. My grandmother, after all, knew a thing or two about grieving.
I did not know my grandmother well. I grew up two thousand miles removed and I saw her once a year, on trips into New York. On a few occasions, she came to Colorado. She slept on a pullout cot during those trips. She struggled with her breath in the Colorado altitude. In the car, my grandmother used to hold onto her seat cushion. Too tightly. I remember seeing the veins pop out in her wrist.
The Frances that I knew lived a life of singularity. Yes, she had her friends and her family, including her daughter and son-in-law nearby. But she lived alone in an apartment not far from Coney Island. She climbed a flight of steep stairs. She entered into the living room of a two-bedroom flat. There was a blue carpet in the living room. There was a blue couch on the blue carpet. There was a silver tea service on the coffee table in front of the blue couch. From the moment I entered her apartment, sometime in the early 1970s, to the very last time, the room stood still.
Time did not. At some point in her aging process my grandmother began to suffer from the effects of dementia. The effects robbed her of normal brain functioning. She lost her memory.
My most meaningful moment with my grandmother occurred at the last moment that it possibly could. My grandmother, in the initial throes of the dementia, could not have marked the change. I can pinpoint it. October, 1999.
I was in the throes of deep grief. The break up of a romantic relationship had taken my breath away. The thrust of my life pushed downward, not forward. The break up created a chasm.
I traveled from my home then in San Francisco to New York to get away from the grief. The grief became more aggressive. The distance created a choking effect. I couldn’t swallow.
One afternoon I traveled out to my grandmother’s apartment, not so far from Coney Island. As always with my grandmother, she stood on the landing above the street, connected by that steep staircase. Like always, she waited for her visitor.
That landing, or the big window in her living room that looked over the street, became the perfect widow’s perch.
I walked up the steep flight of stairs. We went inside. She offered refreshments and I sat down on her blue couch. My grandmother soon sat beside me. In my memory, we didn’t talk. In my memory, I didn’t explain what was going on. My grandmother, in my memory, was struggling on that day with her mind and she wouldn’t have understood. So we sat there, on her blue couch, on the blue carpet, with the silver tea service positioned on the coffee table. We sat there in silence.
My grandmother moved closer to me. She did something then that she’d never done before. Maybe I’d never allowed her to. She touched my hair. She put her hand on the top of my head and slowly she worked her way down the back of my head. She did this again and again.
On some level my grandmother clearly understood my state of mind. After all, she’d experienced her own chasms, her own recoveries, her own steps in different directions. In her gesture, I think, she was showing me the way. She was smoothing out a period, for me, of thorny knots.
The tears welled up and spilled down my face. Big tears, as I remember. Not the small fast tears that sprint down the skin and fall to the floor. The big tears that kind of meander. Unsolicited.
She didn’t wipe my tears. I didn’t wipe my tears. She smoothed my hair.
I sat there, in great grief, in great warmth. In my memory, the moment went on for minutes, more, a half hour, more. Neither of us had any place to go.
Frances Josepher: born November 15, 1910, died July 18, 2008. |
