It is improbable that my grandmother was the first woman over 50 to forward every joke, comic, rumor, chain letter, and political screed that hit her email inbox to literally everyone in her address book–but there can be no question that she was among the first. As someone who made much of her living by typing, Grandma was an early adopter of computer technology, and I first accessed a computer network (Prodigy, a pioneer in the consumer Internet space) from a dial-up modem in her house. Later came America On-Line; later still, broadband. She loved word processors and Print Shop and even the occasional card game, but by the late 1990s her personal computer was first and foremost a machine for consuming, then spreading, pastiches of dubious provenance. She was a veritable Typhoid Mary of memes.
And now, she’s gone.
It took Charon’s ferry twenty years to catch up with Grandma. More, perhaps, given the lengthy illness that preceded her eventual cancer diagnosis. Before I reached my teens, she had retired from administrative work in the office of Jane Hull, then Speaker of the House for the Arizona State Legislature in the United States (coincidentally, former Governor Jane Hull died the day after my grandmother did). After retirement, “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” dominated Grandma’s schedule for a time, though she refused to let it govern her relationship with her many descendants. Baking cookies with grandchildren one day might mean being bedridden the next three, but that never stopped her. Cancer was in some ways an upgrade. For one thing, the treatment plan for cancer was comparatively clear. For another, cancer bore a natural deadline.
I was preparing to leave on a religious mission when Grandma said her first long goodbye. The expectation in those days was that I would not return home for two years, not even for funerals. “You’re the oldest grandson,” she told me. “You need to know that my wedding ring is your inheritance. When you get back, you make sure you get it from whoever has it.” A single diamond set among rubies (her birthstone and mine), the elegant, unostentatious band was far dearer than anything I could have offered a potential bride on my own. I didn’t know what to say, not least because there was, then, no potential bride. So I simply said “thank you.”
“But if you ever get divorced you have to take it back,” Grandma added, ever pragmatic. “It has to stay in the family.”
Gifts were something of a theme for her. In my childhood, gifts arrived at most on three occasions: Christmas, birthdays, and trips to Grandma’s house. In the 1980s, this meant a new Kenner Super Powers action figure or Hasbro Transformer most every visit. In later years, when we lived closer and visits were more frequent, gifts attached to milestones: my sisters chose pieces of Grandma’s jewelry to mark certain birthdays, and we all received luggage sets for high school graduation. When I finished law school, Grandma insisted on purchasing my first briefcase. When great-grandchildren came into the picture, Grandma knitted receiving blankets and re-christened herself “Gigi.”
Her material generosity was almost certainly underwritten by a childhood of scarcity in rural 1940s Idaho–but for as long as I knew her, she lived a life of apparent plenty. I learned to swim in her pool and earned pocket money picking grapefruit from her trees. The summer I turned fourteen, I lived in her guest room while studying computing technology at a nearby community college. Later, Grandma grew to rely on me for technical support. Through most of high school, if ever there was a problem with Grandma’s computer, I would pay her a visit, fix whatever needed fixing, enjoy a sandwich or a piece of chocolate cake, receive $10 or $20 from Grandpa’s wallet, and be on my way. Even during these visits Grandma rarely said much about her childhood, and in the narcissism of adolescence it did not occur to me to ask. Other than warning me against the indignities of growing old, she was rarely prone to meandering reminiscence or fits of sage advice. Sufficient unto her day was ever the good thereof; she was never particularly silent, but in many ways she exemplified the Silent Generation.
For all that, there is one tale I cherish not only in my heart but also in a rusting cookie tin that gathers dust from its place on my bedroom shelves. In grade school, Grandma was assigned to make a class presentation on what she wanted to do when she grew up. Her teacher, Mr. Johnson (not his real name), had intended for his students to research vocational opportunities, and the presentations of my grandmother’s peers reflected their understanding of the brief. So it was with some timidity that she stood before the class and explained that when she grew up, she wanted to go on an African safari.
“He looked at me with such contempt,” Grandma once said to me, relating her teacher’s provincial response. “But he didn’t tell me I’d misunderstood the assignment. He asked me if I knew anyone who had ever been on an African safari. He asked me how an Idaho farmgirl expected to ever be able to afford an African safari. And then he told me that I would never go on an African safari. I felt so stupid. I felt so ashamed.”
“But pretty soon I forgot about it,” she continued. “I forgot about it for years. Until one night, lying under a mosquito net in Africa, I remembered. And that night, right there on the African savanna, I said out loud, ‘Mr. Johnson, wherever you are, up your nose with a rubber hose!’”
Grandma brought me a souvenir from that safari–a cookie tin full of hand-carved wooden figurines. When I went away for two years on the assumption that Grandma would pass before my return, I made note of where the tin was stored and committed to having someone set those animals out at her memorial service, a sort of proxy for my presence. But the opportunity never arose. As you may have already surmised, Grandma beat cancer.
At least, Grandma beat cancer insofar as it is ever possible to beat cancer. “In remission” is the usual terminology: cancer never really leaves, it just goes to sleep for a while. Grandma lived. She gave me her wedding ring anyway, when I found a suitable bride who was, coincidentally, also born in July, but Grandma attended our ceremony in the flesh (and Grandpa gave her a newer, bigger ring). When I brought my wife and, later, children to visit, Grandma would slip me gas money, though by that time she had mostly outgrown the need for technical support. The cancer came back, and she beat it. The cancer came back, and she beat it again. Each battle won bought more time for medical science to find new ways to fight future battles–and time to bake cookies with grandchildren. Time to knit blankets for great-grandchildren. Time to learn how to blind carbon-copy the recipients of an unending stream of recycled Reader’s Digest jokes.
One of the last gifts I received from my grandmother was a pocket watch. It was not hers, nor had it belonged to anyone I knew. But it was one of the last physical effects of a family friend, an unmarried man who was close to my grandparents and, apparently, few others. He lived in California, and whenever my grandparents visited him, Grandma would stock his shelves with food and scold him for “eating like a bachelor” through his twilight years. Grandpa was the executor of the man’s estate, so when he died, my grandparents travelled to California to wrap up his affairs. The man’s belongings were liquidated, a check mailed to a laughing heir. A handful of personal effects of de minimis value were bequeathed to my grandparents in consideration of their friendship and their service. One of these effects was a mechanical pocket watch. Knowing my interest in such devices, my grandmother gave it to me.
“When we were done there,” she said of the experience, “there was nothing left of him. There was no sign on Earth that he had ever existed.” It was the first time I wondered whether my grandmother’s affinity for manifesting her love with keepsakes was more than merely compensating for the poverty of her youth. Her children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren have many mementos to remind us that Grandma was here, and that she cared. My own oldest daughter graduated from high school last year and, per tradition, received a Samsonite luggage set from her Gigi. Like her great-grandmother, my daughter aspires to travel the world. Whenever I am tempted to doubt the sensibility of her dreams, there is a cookie tin of wooden animals to remind me where my daughter came from, and where she has the potential to go. In the shape of a simple luggage set, her beloved Gigi will trail along.
The last time I spoke with my grandmother face to face was in July of 2019. I had accepted a faculty appointment in Florida, and for the first time in my life would be leaving the western United States on a long-term basis. My family’s belongings were already wending their way east, and I was saying my good-byes; I knew already that it would be months, perhaps more than a year, before I would get back to Arizona for a visit. Grandma was saying her good-byes, too. Bad pennies have nothing on cancer. “The medicine stopped working,” Grandma explained. “That’s just how it goes. It works until it doesn’t. I probably won’t last another year.”
“I’ve heard this speech before,” I reminded her. “Twenty years ago.”
Grandma indulged my optimism with a throaty chuckle. “I know,” she replied. “I remember.”
We have spoken a few times since, but only through the miracle of information technology. Mid-April, amidst the madness of global pandemic, Grandma was hospitalized. There was an infection, there was organ failure. Tests for SARS-CoV-2 came back negative, but the pandemic took its toll just the same, preventing visitors from coming to comfort her in the hospital as the end at last approached. My mother, every inch her mother’s daughter, managed to navigate the bureaucracy sufficiently to get Grandma transferred to hospice care, where she died one day later in the company of her husband, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. The visitor limit didn’t apply to the actively dying.
It must have been fated that I would never attend my grandmother’s funeral in the flesh. Probably there will be a memorial service, of sorts; already since March, in addition to transitioning my students from classroom teaching to Canvas, I have attended a wedding and a baptism via Zoom. Another wedding, my youngest brother’s, is being retooled for virtual attendance later this month. Two more weddings, and perhaps Hollywood will buy the story? Anyway if these events are karmic retribution for publishing a philosophical defense of virtual experiences as minimally detrimental to human well-being, the lesson is likely to pass unlearned. My cookie-tin of African animals will never serve the only purpose I ever thought to assign it, but it has apparently served my grandmother’s purposes very well: it brings her life to mind.
As SARS-CoV-2 robs us disproportionately of our elderly, shortening their span however fractionally, we are diminished. But though it dominates our headlines in this particular moment, death–even en masse–is nothing new. To delay the effects of COVID-19 we have already sacrificed billions, perhaps trillions of dollars in economic activity. We have mobilized researchers and health professionals, closed schools, inflated our currency, and mortgaged the future. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made headlines with the claim that “we’re not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable and we’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life.” But when the present crisis passes–and one way or another, it will pass–will we remember those words? Will we mobilize researchers and inflate currency and mortgage our future against all kinds of death, or can we only be bothered to coordinate action against pandemics that trend on Twitter? My grandmother’s generation worked toward an imagined future where humans lived longer lives, some on other planets, free not only from poverty and hunger but also from heart disease and cancer. They didn’t get us to other planets, but the Silent Generation was first to walk on the moon. They didn’t cure every kind of cancer, but they made an impressive start. In some ways, we face higher hurdles–the low-hanging fruit has been plucked. But in others, we benefit from pre-cut paths, from foundations previously laid, little gifts left by our forebears to remind us that they were here, and that they cared. I worry that in the present crisis we have valorized inaction over action, that we are looking for others to provide solutions instead of taking responsibility for creating our own. A friend who works in information technology likes to remind me that “the ‘cloud’ is just someone else’s computer.” Likewise, “the government” is just someone else, and “stimulus money” that wasn’t yours in the first place was also someone else’s–sometimes, someone not yet born. What “gifts” do we leave behind for those who follow after us?
The day before her Gigi’s death, we celebrated my oldest daughter’s birthday with chocolate cake (Gigi’s recipe). When I told her of my grandmother’s passing, she embraced me and cried. “I feel like it came out of nowhere,” she said, even though it was a death first anticipated long before her birth. “I feel like I wasn’t prepared.” Maybe we never are. For all our futurism and forecasting, for all our prepping and predicting, tomorrow is elusive game. But one of the last emails my grandmother copied to my inbox was a story about a woman asking to be buried with a fork in her hand. The inspirational punch-line was that people say “keep your fork” when dinner dishes are cleared to make way for dessert; “keep your fork” is a reminder that (in the parlance of poetry and poultry for the soul) the “BEST is yet to come!!!” The gifts of our progenitors are not only souvenirs that they were here. Toys to play with as a child, a ring to propose to a wife; luggage for leaving the nest, a briefcase to ply my trade. The message of my grandmother’s life, in retrospect, is crystal clear, and her voice echoes from beyond the grave the silent chorus of her generation.
Grandma sings, as she has always sung, “move forward!”
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