Goodbye Momma

After all this time, you are still with me

She looked so small. There in the hospital bed, shrunken by age and illness. Who was this woman? Where had my witty, sarcastic, grandmother, my staunchest fan and our family anchor, gone?

Deceptively tiny, she towered over the world from less than five feet tall. Momma was the center of the family, and the center of my grandfather’s life. She filled the room with her smiles and her stories. Even though those stories changed with every telling.

Talking is love

As a child, I spent every summer with my grandparents, giving my parents a break and me some wonderful memories and valuable life lessons.

While Poppa worked, Momma and I cooked, read, played gin rummy, looked at old photos and talked. In truth, she talked and I listened. I could listen to her stories of relatives for hours, pulling out a box of photos and passing them to her with the question ‘who was this?’

In her words, Aunt Gussie, Uncle Max, and Grandma Rose lived again, joining our conversations and even appearing in my little-girl playtimes. Like Momma, they were wonderful company, all with the same sparkling wit and special foibles. Perhaps this is what drives my love of genealogy.

Momma listened patiently to my complaints, commiserated with my woes, and cheered my triumphs. During the school year I wrote to her almost every week, and spoke to her every Sunday, pulling the kitchen phone on its long cord down into the pantry so we could talk in private. Girls need that.

As I grew up, I told her more of my adventures. When I learned to drive, she told me about seeing the first cars come rumbling through the NYC streets, and about her own efforts to learn to drive. We left out the reason she stopped driving — she drove my teenager father’s car under a truck. Fortunately, she was so short that the truck’s body passed over her head. Or so the story goes.

As my little girl days filled with big girl activities, we spoke less often, and I stopped writing weekly letters, but we remained close. Our calls always ended the same way: ‘Be careful, schaine maidel, pretty girl.’ ‘Don’t worry Momma.’ ‘I have to worry, that’s my job.’

Momma made it to my undergraduate and veterinary school graduations. She loved the parties and loved seeing me with yet another parchment. Oy, and how she kvelled when I became a veterinarian…from then on, all of her physicians knew to expect calls from ‘my granddaughter, the doctor.’

Worrying is love

When cancer struck at 88, she apologized for passing on bad genes to us. She fought bravely, staying positive even when the chemo and radiation therapy gave her embarrassing side effects. We spoke almost every day, just to check in.

Mom, Dad and I flew to Florida for her surgery. It was our turn to worry.

I sat with her in pre-op, grilling her anesthesiologist and laughing as she tried to set me up with her surgeon. I can hear her now, just before they rolled her into the operating room: ‘Schaine maidel, isn’t he handsome? Dr. X, meet my granddaughter, isn’t she beautiful? She’s also a doctor, you know. You two should talk.’

She never stopped looking for my happiness.

Finally, when we realized that 24-hour, in-home care was no longer enough, we moved my grandparents to a nursing home in another state. Even then, my grandmother charmed everyone on the flight and in both airports.

After the move her cancer ran wild, as we knew it would. She became quieter, lost her appetite, and ultimately had to be transferred to a hospital. And though we tried to limit invasive care, me with my medical degree and mom as a retired nursing home administrator, this was the early 2000s and all we could enforce was a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate order).

Food is love

Now the woman who ate whole hot peppers for fun was fed a bland diet. The grandmother who taught me to drink Apricot Sours was offered only water. Trying to bring her some semblance of pleasure, we smuggled in chocolate milkshakes, or hot and sour soup from the local Chinese takeout. We even brought her hot cherry peppers. Her eyes lit up when she ate, but she could not take in enough to restore her flagging energy.

The time was coming. It became obvious that she would not leave the hospital. Hospice as we know it today did not exist.

By then my grandfather had fallen and broken his hip (or vice versa, as so often happens to the very old — we never did learn which came first). He was in a room up the hall; the hospital could not (would not?) put them in the same room. Together for 70 years, they would soon part permanently.

One of my saddest memories is of my grandfather in a wheelchair, shrunken and frail himself. He held my grandmother’s hand and told her that he would take her home soon, make her a root beer float. We all knew it was not true but kept up the charade. It’s what you do when you can’t face the truth.

Goodbye is love

I could not stay with her forever; work demanded my attention and I flew back home. On my last day, I sat by her bed, holding her hand. Not saying anything, as we had sat together so many times during my childhood. Finally I told her that it was okay to go. ‘Go find Grandma Rose, Momma. Have an Apricot Sour with her and give her my love.’ I left to catch my flight.

She died two days later, never speaking again.

I cried, more for my grandfather, left alone after all these years, than for myself. Years later, even writing this essay, I still cry. She was my friend, play partner, advisor, cheerleader, shoulder to cry on or laugh with. Every child deserves a grandmother like mine.

Memories are love

When I look at those photos now, I hear her voice. And I picture her, sitting at a table with Rose, Gussie, Carl, Max, and the rest, playing cards, telling stories, drinking Apricot Sours, and laughing.

I will never be someone’s grandmother, someone’s Momma. But I was lucky to have her in my life.

I love you Momma.

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