Grandma Wetherbe

The remotest ancestor I knew in person was my maternal grandmother, your great grandmother, Alleene Bond Wetherbe, born in 1888, died in 1972. Had she lived to see you, she would have been by far the oldest person left on earth by the day of your birth. She was already thirty-nine and just widowed when her eleventh and last child, my mother, was born. She was seventy-four by the time I was born, and of course it took me nearly half a century to become a father to you. Averaging just over forty years a turn, that’s a lineage that pushes the upper limit of human generational intervals. I don’t know why it should amuse me but it does. With just three births, we stretched from the Victorian era well into the 21st century.

My earliest memories of Grandma Wetherbe are around the hazy age of four. A fiercely devout, old-fashioned, and independent rural New Englander, she had lived alone on her little scrap of farm for twenty years after the last of her brood had scattered. Then at seventy-eight, she slipped in her bathtub and broke her hip. She crawled out of the tub somehow and across the the kitchen to her first and only recently installed telephone. A month or so later, she was out of the hospital, shuffling on a walker, and she came down to New Jersey to live with us. It was 1966.

The only previous time she had come to New Jersey had been during my parents’ engagement. The wedding was planned for Labor Day weekend up in Massachusetts, and Grandma Wetherbe figured that if she were expecting her latest set of in-laws to come to her home, it was only polite to visit them first. Seventy-three at the time and having never learned to drive a car, she took trains to get to my father’s town. She had worried my other grandmother by not forecasting her exact time of arrival, and then astonished her by showing up at their doorstep, suitcase in hand, one hot summer afternoon, having walked three miles with that suitcase directly from the station. I wish I could have been there when those two women met. They were a good nineteen years apart in age and about fifty years apart in life ways. 

I never did see the two of them in a room together. When Grandma Wetherbe moved in with us, her country walking days were over. She wasn’t the type to domineer, interfere, or even talk much, but being a grandmother, after all, she automatically took stock of what her grandchildren’s upbringing lacked. In my case, she took note of my disgusting habit of endlessly rootling about absentmindedly in my snotty nostrils. A less thrifty woman might have force-fed me tissues, but Grandma Wetherbe decided to turn me into a gentleman of the elegant handkerchief.

Her strategy was to generate a sense of ownership of the handkerchief in me. (I was tempted to write, “pride of ownership,” but Grandma Wetherbe frowned on pride, so that can’t be.) To accomplish this end, she bought a dime-store packet of cheap, white, mass-manufactured men’s handkerchiefs and set to work embroidering them.

I had no favorite color as a small boy. I only knew I already hated hospital green. My grandmother decided therefore to use her own discretion. She thought purple was a manly color, fit for Biblical kings.

She embroidered each cheap handkerchief elaborately by hand, edging them in purple thread and then stitching my initials in gothic, purple-and-lavender lettering in one corner of each. I thought they were pretty, but strange, like ungainly butterflies stuffed into my small shirt pockets. Rolling around in my wheelchair or stumping on my crutches, I quickly dropped and lost them, then returned to my more traditional, manual excavations.

My grandmother tried again. Each morning she approached me as soon as I had gotten dressed, bearing a clean, handsomely monogrammed handkerchief and a safety pin. With the pin she would affix the handkerchief directly to my shirtfront, just above the breast pocket, if I had one, so that it was now like a limp specimen of that same ungainly butterfly secured to my chest.

I don’t recall how long this project lasted. At some point, at my insistence, the handkerchiefs were permitted to be stuffed in a pants pocket and neglected, except in my grandmother’s presence.

If she hadn’t yet had a stroke when she broke her hip, Grandma had one discreetly after she moved in with us. A sturdy and formerly stern woman, she began quickly to become rather pleasantly daffy and indifferent to action as the year progressed. The following summer, at the end of which I turned five, I and my little sister, Alleene, who was Grandma’s namesake, spent long hours on sunny days playing in the backyard around our grandmother’s chaise lounge as she watched us or napped in the shade. She always kept her glasses on and charmingly pretended that she watched us like a hawk and never slept, although we often used her torso as a desk or played with small toys on her gently rising and falling chest.

One Monday morning, Grandma emerged from her room at 8am precisely, dressed in her Sunday best, complete with flower and hat. I remember the incident not because it meant much to me that she’d forgotten what day it was or that she’d spent hours at our Baptist services only yesterday, but because being corrected by my mother so distressed her and left her clearly frightened as well as upset. Her anxiety also bothered me. I wasn’t used to seeing an alarmed adult, and never my mother or her mother, but they were both clearly flustered with each other, and Grandma in particular seemed as horrified as if she’d wandered out of her room without having dressed at all. She, all of her children, most of her grandchildren, and of course her own parents and grandparents, had structured their entire lives by regular church services, the sundials around which the trivial shadows of each week progressed. To be confused about when to go to church was, for her, akin to being confused about who she was. And she was.

Not long after that, my mother’s youngest of several older sisters, my beloved spinster Aunt Elizabeth, the kindest of the family, the one who knitted every grandchild a personal blanket, missing not a single birth or adoption over decades, the one who in the end was the longest lived of the siblings by yet another half a decade, decided that it would help Grandma’s peace of mind if she moved back up to rural Massachusetts and lived with her. So she did.

And after that, I saw little of Grandma Wetherbe. Although she lived with Aunt Liz, she kept the farm, eventually taking tenants. Summers when I turned six and seven and eight and nine, we visited. I can vaguely remember my parents, aunts, and uncles talking in quiet voices about how Grandma was doing or about some latest incident. 

She seemed sweet to me, nevertheless, although less and less mobile, and was always delighted to visit her farm with us. One summer, with the help of my mother and Aunt Liz, she introduced Alleene and me to the delights of raw goat’s milk on blueberries we’d just picked. And the summer that  I turned six, she was delighted to see that my parents had given me a yellow pup-tent for my birthday and insisted that, as a birthday treat, I be allowed to camp by myself one night in her meadow back of the barn. I did, and I retain a vivid memory of the early sun the next morning, lighting the yellow canvas over me a blazing gold and silhouetting the outline of a Daddy Long-Legs that was delicately traversing the glowing expanse, while I observed from my sleeping bag, up on one elbow, silently.

Things take their course. We are a senescing species, after all, and although we don’t age all at once and mercifully like salmon or the one-horse shay in the poem beloved by Grandma Wetherbe, we age inevitably. The last time I saw Grandma she was eighty-three, had just had a serious stroke, and been placed in a nursing home. She struggled to talk or recognize me. 

When I was nearing ten years old, I was playing in the driveway of our home with my friend Donald Murphy, when my father rolled out to tell me that Grandma Wetherbe had died. He and Mom would be going up for the funeral in Massachusetts over the weekend. My other grandparents would look after my siblings and me.

After my father went back inside, Donny Murphy, who was eight, stared at me. To his credit, the kid knew something about condolences and tried to say something to comfort me. But I didn’t need condolences. I wasn’t struck by grief. I was too busy processing the news that the thing I had heard of and read about for years already, death, had finally crept a bit closer to my family and become a newly fixed component of reality.