My Grandma Jane died about ten days ago. It was quite sudden and also peaceful, two attributes which don’t often coincide. She was 88 and generally in blooming health. ("People in our family don't get sick," she said recently. "We just drop dead.") On her last night of life, she went to a Christmas party at her church. I met the little old ladies who were with her that night, and they told me how wonderful a time they had. They laughed and talked and told funny stories about Christmases when they were kids. They ate a nice meal, plenty of Christmas cookies, and sang carols. Grandma Jane was reluctant to leave, even when her ride wanted to go. “She was the life of the party,” they said. “She had us all in stitches.” And then, she went home, put on her pajamas, climbed into bed, got cozy, and died.
This weekend was her funeral in Houston. Through the help of a philanthropist, I was able to get there despite several logistical challenges and the outrageous cost of the flight. Both Friday and Saturday were gruelingly long days with complicated and indeed unreasonable schedules. But I found that in the company of my mother, my uncle John and my two aunts, Judy and Barb, I was inherently happy, and most of the time laughing until my sides hurt.
Not that we weren’t also quite sad about the death. At the funeral itself, we sat attentively through the Reverend’s talk. But then he sat down, and Amazing Grace started to play. Everyone in our small party began to weep. Grandma Jane lay there as if asleep in her beautiful open casket, smothered in stargazer lilies and delphiniums. Images from her life ran through my head. I felt the long scope of her experience on earth, and generally the crushing hardship of it, and generally her amusement, brightness and good cheer.
She made a lot of bad decisions in her life, married two alcoholics, got entangled with a third, and spent much of her life in bleakest most awful poverty. In some ways, her incurable optimism and her unbelievable ability to see through rose-colored glasses made her life a lot worse: you can’t fix a problem if you refuse to see it. And then again, a lot better. She was always fun.
Most of my memories of her stem from a year when I was about five and my mother and I lived with her down in rural Louisiana, near a small town called Tickfaw. It’s such a long story I can’t go into it much here. But suffice it to say that we were extremely poor. We had no running water and carried water from the lake in buckets. It rained all the time and the place was teaming with poisonous snakes and spiders. We had little to eat save eggs from the chickens, milk from the goats, and horrible beans. Nothing edible would grow as the soil was pure sand. My mother was indeed worried that we were getting scurvy and made us all drink pine needle tea as an available source of vitamin C. (We had plenty of pine needles!)
But despite all this my grandmother took good care of me that year. She made the eggs and goat milk into hot egg nog to feed me in the morning, and it was a way I could get something down without crying. She read me The Little Lame Prince at night and she and I slept in the same bed. When a rooster took a special dislike of me, and attacked me every time I stepped out of the house, she wrapped him in a towel and shook him, so I thus could carry my special towel as a talisman of protection. One thing that did grow there was flowers. A huge Cherokee rose smothered a tree taller than the house. A giant wisteria created a roof of flowers over the back yard. Azaleas seemed to be piled everywhere in bright pink heaps. She had a way of looking beyond the squalor around us and seeing only the flowers.
After the funeral on Saturday we had to pile in the car and drive three or four hours to the cemetery. She was buried near her second husband and their little daughter Cathy, who died as a child. On the drive we entertained ourselves with funny stories, including amorous clowns and hostile chain-smoking men in bunny suits. Never a lull in conversation, but everyone clamoring to tell another one.
Here are a few:
One time my aunts Judy and Barbara took Grandma Jane into New Orleans to the French Quarter to have some fun. Soon they were approached by a clown in full clown attire—big red shoes, rubber nose, rainbow wig, white face makeup with vertical lines through his eyes, giant pants, etc. But this clown was not coming to perform for them… no, this amorous clown was trying to hit on my aunt Barbara. (Barbara resembled Raquel Welch and this sort of thing was always happening to her.) He wanted Barbara to come with him and have a date. Barbara, as you might expect, was not interested. The ridiculous clown followed them around trying to persuade her. Grandma Jane pulled Judy aside. “Judy,” she said. “Don’t let Barbara go with him. If he abducts her, how will we ever identify him?”
* * *
One time one of Grandma Jane’s horses disappeared from her pasture. She suspected that the bad boys from the neighboring farm had taken the horse. She took down her shot gun and marched over their house. She banged on the door with the butt of her gun. The lady of the house answered the door nervously, saying “W—what do you want Jane?” And grandma said, “My horse is missing and I wondered if you’ve seen it.” “No, I haven’t seen it,” said the lady. “Um… what’s the gun for?” And grandma said, “Oh, just in case there’s a squirrel I want to shoot.” (The horse reappeared in the pasture an hour later.)
* * *
Now and then Grandma Jane would take her shotgun out into the yard and blast off a few rounds. She would say, “You have to remind people that you’re armed.”
* * *
At our house in Minnesota one time, there was a fire. I was maybe four years old. At some point during the night, I moved from my bed to my mother’s. My mother wasn’t there. A cat knocked a lamp on my bed and started to smolder. When I woke up at dawn the room was full of smoke. Grandma Jane came in and got me, carried me out. We didn’t have a phone and it was the dead of winter. We walked down to the neighbor’s and knocked on the door. But she didn’t want to be rude. She stood and chatted for a few minutes. Oh, how’s it going, how are you? And so on. Only after making pleasant conversation for a little while did she mention, “Oh, by the way, could I use your phone real quick? I want to call the fire department. Our house is on fire.”
* * *
In that fire my new doll was burned up and melted. I remember it lying in the snow charred and black, a loss which made me cry and cry. Perhaps this is why, a year or two later, she bought a doll for me in New Orleans. It was a fancy lady doll, porcelain, wearing a sort of an antebellum dress with a black velvet bodice and a big purple skirt. I didn’t know about this doll until a few days ago. Barbara explained that she found it recently and asked Grandma Jane about it. “Oh, that’s for Catherine. She picked it out. She wanted it. I’ve been meaning to send it to her.” That is, she’s been meaning to send it to me for at least 38 years and never quite gotten around to it, nor given up on the plan. I got the doll the other day. It really is quite the thing, and I’m sure if I had gotten it when I was five I would’ve just loved it. In fact, I love it now. It makes me smile, because it demonstrates both sides of her character—a generous considerate spirit, the best intentions, but painfully limited organizational skills or follow-through.
* * *
She loved animals, again to a fault. When the floor of her kitchen rotted through, and the bottom of her fridge rotted out, a possum moved in. She used the defunct fridge for a cupboard and every morning the possum greeted her. "Hello, possum!" she would say brightly.
* * *
When a tiny orphaned bat appeared on her doorstep (something I've noticed never happened to any of the other grandmothers in the world), she picked it up and gently placed it in a little yogurt container lined with paper towels. Then she drove it way across Houston to a wild life rescue place where someone would take it. "I just wouldn't know what to feed it," she explained.
* * *
Back in Tickfaw, she had a horrible motley selection of cur dogs, but fantasized that they were somehow good breeding stock. “We’ve got to preserve the bloodlines!” she would say. She wanted to breed a line of pure white German shepherds from these horrible mangy, flea-ridden dogs, and planned to have these lovely concrete kennels and dog runs one day. At her house in Houston even now, she has two such dogs. One young and timid, one old and incontinent, her tail bald from dermatitis. Grandma Jane was the patron saint of lost causes. Then by happenstance at her graveside, we were joined by a lovely version of this exact kind of dog. A soft silky white dog came running over to us as the preacher was reading his solemn words. The closed casket was there, suspended over the bare root-filled hole in the ground where she will now spend eternity. The dog seemed a joyful spirit welcoming her to her new home. It tried to get in everyone’s lap, and made some of our party giggle at inappropriate moments. The dog’s love and exuberance lightened the mood a great deal and made it much easier to leave her there. “I’ve never seen this dog before,” said the Preacher. “It wasn’t here until y’all got here.” No, this was a special dog just for her. A silk white dog, healthy, frisky, just like she would’ve wanted. “It’s a good thing she isn’t here,” someone said. “She’d take this dog home with her.”
Ellen Jane Schenck Chaffee Deason, rest in peace.
a few family photos online here: