That Sort of Life

My paternal grandmother, your great grandmother Edith, was the last born of my grandparents and also the longest lived, thus the last to die. Yet a single calendrical century easily contained the whole of her life. She was born in 1907. In 1996, she died.
 
I think about my grandmother often when I’m considering what might define “a good life.” She lived just shy of ninety years. She raised three sons who all gave her grandchildren, who in turn all made it to adulthood and gave her several great grandchildren as well. At the time of her death, all her sons and grandchildren were still alive.  She accomplished most of her major goals. The daughter of a scandalously abandoned mother, she went on to live a comfortably middle class life, untouched by any scandals herself. She managed her family finances and household needs wisely and efficiently. She married at a suitable age and remained married for sixty-two years to my grandfather, her stable, reliable "provider," until the night he died in bed beside her, aged eighty-five. She lived independently well into her ninth decade and pretty nearly as she wanted to live most of her life. She died exactly as she did not want to die.
 
My grandmother’s home was always clean and bright. Her cooking was conventional but competent and precise. She was the sort of woman who wore a neatly tied apron in the kitchen, usually over a string of pearls and a monochromatic knee-length dress. She had her hair permed weekly, and her hairstyle from 1950 to 1990 hardly changed at all, but she let it go silver, then white, because she considered it vulgar to dye. Occasionally, I was lucky enough to catch her warbling to herself during chores, “Darling, I am growing old/ Silver threads among the gold.”  She collected Hummel figurines and kept fresh mints on glass dishes on the end tables, under the reading lights. As a small boy, I always felt privileged whenever I was invited to spend the night.
 
She had her little vanities and surprises. She tried to never let herself be photographed in profile because she was shy about what she called “my Dick Tracy nose.” It had an indentation in the bridge, a reduced version of which I have myself. And when I was visiting my grandparents once in my teens, I was startled to realize that she had a 1920s first edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay hid high on a shelf. The one or two pictures I saw of her from that era, just before she wed my long-legged grandfather, show a coyly stylish young woman with a wide face and bobbed hair, clearly attempting a demure take on the “It Girl” look of Clara Bow.
 
She was famous among her sons, grandchildren, and daughters-in-law for her manner of being politely reproving, writing letters in cursive ink on cream stationery, explaining what we had done to offend her and actually posting the notes to us through the mail. These letters weren’t sent often, but on the rare occasion I received one, it stung. The year I passed my doctoral qualifying exams in modernist poetry and poetics at Emory, I got a polite note from Grandma congratulating me and then rebuking me for having showed up to a wedding on my last visit home looking shabby and woolly in my great beard and ponytail, behaving jokily with my brother Jimmy at the reception. “That’s not how an English professor should conduct himself, at all.”
 
The question of how properly to look one’s station in life vied in importance for her with the question of how to improve that station. Her mother had been born a Ryerson, a descendant of the oldest Dutch family in New Jersey. Her people had settled in the 1620s and ‘30s. They counted the first Dutch child born in the New World among their ancestry, and through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries they had grown rather wealthy and smug. By the time my grandmother's mother was a young woman, however, her branch of the family was floating more on reputation than actual riches, and she made the mistake of falling in love with a handsome devil who was a ne'er-do-well journeyman carpenter, then marrying him despite parental objections. One night, he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned, leaving my great grandmother a shamed single mother with an only daughter, Edith, aged eight.
 
My great grandmother never remarried, and my grandmother became something of a lifelong obsessive about reacquiring and maintaining reputation. She’d not gone beyond high school herself, and her own good-looking young husband, my grandfather, had only a ninth-grade education. But he was a worker and steady, and he stayed employed straight the Great Depression, while my grandmother built her local social circle, volunteering, presiding over ladies’ clubs, remaining prominently a part of her Dutch Reformed Church’s congregation. There was a terrible setback when my father, her second son, was born with a devastating bone condition, but she soldiered on. Her oldest boy grew up to look like his father, serve in the Navy, and attend Penn State University.
 
The college thing was of particular concern to my grandmother. There were no especially gifted students in her immediate family, but she keenly felt the social value of a college education. When I went away to an Ivy League school, she promptly slapped on her car the one and only bumper sticker that it ever sported: Princeton. She refused to remove it for years after I’d dropped out. "After all," she would remind me, "you did attend." The sticker only disappeared with the sale of the car itself.
 
So when she wrote me that last time, fretting over whether I comported myself in accordance with her idea of how a young English professor should appear, she meant every word. It was important to her, and it shamed me. I tried to do better. It helped that I soon became an actual professor. It helped that for a while, early in my career, I kept to a close-trimmed, sculpted beard, a generic short haircut, and always wore a tie to work. It helped that, a year after I’d taken my first position at Morehouse College, I brought my gracious southern girlfriend, an educated woman from a prosperous and educated family to visit her. That visit truly impressed my Grandma. But even then, at eighty-four, she was on the alert for any slippage that might send the wrong impression to anyone overhearing. When I referred to what someone had said to my girlfriend “and me,” my grandmother immediately hyper-corrected me: “Oh! You mean, ‘her and I,’ Mark, not ‘her and me.’ Goodness, people will never believe you’re an English professor, talking like that.”
 
The remarkable thing was that my grandmother’s fixation on reputation never made her cruel or unwelcoming of differences. When my parents adopted a slew of children of varying ethnicities and disabilities, she included them as family automatically, although her private letters to my father questioned his financial sanity. When her beloved eldest grandchild, my cousin Brad, came colorfully out of the closet in the mid-seventies, she accepted it without recoil (unlike his father and younger brothers, who nearly disowned him). When Brad’s younger brother Scott married into a Jewish family, my Dutch Reformed grandmother happily attended her great-grandson’s bris.  She never circled the wagons, although she was forever retouching their trim.
 
Not long after I made my first visit to her as an appropriately attired and partnered young professor, my grandmother suffered a major stroke. Here her story turned darker. If it had been someone else or a different sort of stroke, perhaps, I might not say so. My other grandmother, for instance, had slid into senility by easy degrees and had never been afraid of any sort of end. Likewise my mother later, who, before her own series of small strokes, had attended the bedsides of hundreds of patients with advanced dementia over the years. But my grandmother Edith had been explicit about the nature of her dread. Repeatedly in her seventies and eighties she had told me that what she feared most was a long and incapacitated twilight. She had been immensely relieved when my grandfather, clearly fading a bit but with his basic memories and personality intact, had died at home, peacefully in his sleep. Over and over again she had told me that she did not want to die gabbling and trapped in a metal-barred bed.
 
She almost got away intact. She was living alone and on her own the day she had the massive stroke. Had no one found her, she might have simply slipped out of existence, but my brother and his fiancée stopped by to visit her that day and found her unconscious. She was taken to a hospital and revived, more or less, with severe damage to her thalamus.
 
My grandmother lived another four years in a barred bed. She never was herself again. She drifted in and out of awareness, sometimes recognizing or mistaking someone for someone else, sometimes staring blankly and mouthing an inarticulate whisper. The last time I visited her, she was snoring softly and, although I hadn’t seen her in over a year and knew I might not see her again, I refused to try to wake her.
 
A few months later, I was in Edinburgh, teaching a summer class in the literature of the supernatural, the day I got the phone call from my brother Jimmy that our grandmother had died. My first thought was that I was glad for her and relieved. My second, less rational thought, was that her ghost might approve of my class. Since then, I have wondered, when I think of her, what makes for a satisfactory life? Is a good life truly marred by an unhappy end?
 
In the summer of 1983, after I had dropped out of university for the second time, I was working a night shift at a donut shop and was something of a disgrace. My grandparents started having me over once a week for lunch. My grandfather would first have me mow their small lawn, then closely inspect the result. The two of us would go back inside, to an enclosed back porch. My grandmother would serve grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, and an exact square of coffee ice cream sliced and centered on a clear glass plate for dessert. Conversation meandered while Grandpa and I, who ate quickly, would wait for Grandma, who ate delicately and with deliberation, to finish. Leaf-filtered summer light fell through the porch’s wall of windows, onto my grandmother’s thoughtful face. “We expect you to go back to school,” she would say quietly, almost as if thinking to herself, and then she'd look up to make eye contact with me. “You’re too bright for this sort of life. You need to teach.”
 
At just that moment, the sun in the windows, my grandparents on either side, I rather liked that sort of life, but I would only nod dutifully and get up to clear the plates.