Community – Page 8 – Laura Stavoe

April 10, 2020June 14, 2020

Your Words

I feel lucky these days to be a word person. Even though I miss physical closeness, writing and storytelling have always been important forms of connection for me, too.

When I was a kid, my Aunt Carol would send us letters from Colorado and my family would sit around the kitchen table while my mom read them aloud. My aunt’s letters were newsy and insightful and funny. Reading them gave us a sense of intimacy—different than when we were all together with my cousins in the same room—but just as true.

Books, too, have provided me with a feeling of closeness that is difficult to explain. To this day it is hard to believe that Laura Ingalls Wilder or Beverly Cleary or Mary Oliver or Toni Morrison never knew me. Their writing seems to suggest otherwise. Not because the details of our lives were the same (they weren’t), but because the intimacy of their writing made me feel understood. Known.

Your letters did that for me this week, too, gave me opportunities to connect.

Next week, I plan to write about resources people have found or created to tend to end-of-life matters in the time of coronavirus. Like every other area of life, distancing measures have upended our normal ways of caregiving, mourning, and honoring end-of-life.

I want to share one with you this week that number of friends sent my way, Brene’ Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us with grief expert David Kessler. Kessler speaks to why story sharing is so often part of our grief process:

Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.

Your stories about your loved ones were gifts this week. Thank you. And thank you for bearing witness.

It’s coming up on the 1st Anniversary of my 16-year-old nephew’s death by suicide followed 10 days later by my Auntie’s death of alcoholism. I’m experiencing, in hospice terminology, intense anticipatory grief. The quarantine is making it so much harder because I want to be near my cousins at this time to hug. Grief needs human touch.
Mindy Franssen

I lost my husband at age 52 to cancer and it shattered the nicely constructed future that included retirement, travel, and artistic growth. Every summer, both before Rob died and after, my parents would come from Kansas to visit and stay for a week or so. We would always plan a big pool party with family and friends. Over the years it became a noisy annual bash that we all looked forward to.
Three years after Rob’s death, we had our summer party. As we were gathering dishes and putting things away, I stopped in my tracks and started crying. My tears were triggered by a wonderful and horrible mix of emotions. I was stung by the realization that I hadn’t thought of Rob at all. I hadn’t said to myself “Rob would have loved this. I’m miss him so much”.
The realization that my life was moving on and I was making progress was a GOOD thing. But the realization that I had forgotten him during this event was also devastating. He had been such a big part of it: cooking, socializing, and celebrating. The pain came rushing up, full strength and unbound, a mixture of pride and sorrow. I had reached a turning point, a milestone, in a messy process that still continues, sixteen years later.
Susie Fisher

My Nonie (maternal grandmother) is forever the voice in my head. It is her wisdom I lean on when I don’t know what to do, and if I’m lost or need advice I always think “What would Nonie say?” Since she went home, I have missed her physical presence, but because she was such a big part of my upbringing (she was more a mother to me than my mom – she truly cared and would show up when I needed her) I knew what she would say at any given moment. I don’t necessarily mark the anniversary of her passing, but I honor her and include her at every moment when I need her and her wisdom – thus honoring her beyond the anniversary of her death.
Here are some Nonie sayings that stay with me:
They’ve got the same pants to get glad in that they got mad in.
Let’s not go borrowing trouble from tomorrow.
If I see something I’ve never seen before, I’ll throw my hat at it.
Let’s buy some gum so we can have something to chonk on.
And my favorite:
I love you Hessie Annie – to the moon and back.
Leslie

My mom and dad died five months apart to the day in 2001 in June and November. I was happy my mom missed 9/11 and that my dad was so out of it by then, that he basically missed it too. My mom died of lymphoma and my dad of pancreatic cancer. To this day I miss them both, but especially my mom. I never realized how very much I loved her until she wasn’t here anymore. However, with time, the pain fades and I remember the good times and I smile. I sometimes dream about my parents. In the dream they are much younger than when they died, and it is always a happy occasion.
My mother’s birthday is May 22. My best friend’s mother’s birthday is May 23. She is also deceased. Around the time of their birthday, the two of us always go out for a special lunch honoring our mothers. We have a lovely time together and reminisce for a few hours.
Carol Y

What I remember about July 24, 1956 is walking into our back porch to meet my sister who told me our mother died. I was coming home from my summer job with Pepsi Cola and had just completed my junior year in high school. I do remember thinking that this cannot be. I knew Mom had not been well, but everyone told me she would get better. Times were different in 1956. We did not talk about the possibility of losing one’s mother to cancer.
The following morning, I got up and went to work only to be met by the executive who also was our neighbor. He told me I should go home. No one had told me how to act in that situation, that you didn’t go to work the day after your mom died. The rest of my loss process is a blur, though I know there was a service and gathering at the cemetery.
The part I held onto for a long time was I wish I had told mom how kind she was. Not just to me but to everyone who knew her. How proud I was that she was my mother and her part in making our home a happy place.
Ron Stavoe

The last eight of my 62 years have included many losses. Just as I get to calm water and whoosh, here comes another loss. All along the way there have been loved ones and dear friends by my side. One of my favorite things I heard from a friend years ago and I like to share with others is “God is Fancy.”
I always think of my mom in the spring. She died on the first day of spring and her birthday was May 12, so spring flowers always remind me of her. Irises were one of her favorites. Not long before she died, I transplanted some of my mom’s iris into my yard in Montana.
A few years ago, I went through a very painful divorce. I left Montana and moved back to Boise in the middle of winter. I was heartbroken because the iris bulbs were buried in snow, so I couldn’t take them with me.
Eventually, as I rebuilt my life in Boise, I was able to buy a beautiful little cottage. That first spring when blossoms began to appear, I discovered the house was surrounded by purple iris. God is fancy.
Just yesterday I was out planting some flower seeds and enjoying the daffodils that are growing and the tulips are about to bloom. And I talked with my mom. I told her I wished she could see my beautiful yard and walk around with me and see all the beautiful flowers. And then I thought, silly me, she is right her with me. Alas, the purple iris, I can feel her winking at me.
Teresa Best McDonald

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. I would love to read more of your stories! Please consider adding them in the comments section. (If you don’t see a place for comments, click here.) I hope you will also consider subscribing by leaving your name and your email below.

April 3, 2020June 14, 2020

All of It

Tending to Endings (fourteen)

Lately, it has been impossible for me to not think about last year this time. I imagine with a pandemic going on, many of us are more reflective. We likely have more alone time, for one, save those who are front-line workers or parents of young children in which case, thank you, thank you, thank you for showing up each day in these harrowing conditions.

I am pretty sure I am not the only one missing their mom at this time, too. Or missing someone who helped hold them steady who is no longer reachable by phone or zoom.

I alternate between feeling my mom’s absence profoundly, and then, maybe even simultaneously, feeling relieved that she didn’t have to experience this in her fragile state at the end of her life. All of us in my family were at our limit last spring. I cannot imagine adding a pandemic into the situation.

And it occurs to me that a year later, even with Covid-19 begging every minute of our collective attention, my mom’s death is here sitting in the room with me.

There was a time when I would’ve said I would rather honor my mom’s birthday rather than the day she died. And, well, yes, that sounds positive, and logical. In the long run, August 28 will be the day to celebrate all Jane Stavoe brought to this world.

But apparently that does not mean that when April 9 comes around, my heart or my bones will let the anniversary be ignored. I didn’t think about that part.

I know many readers have also gone through the death of someone very close and have more perspective than I do on anniversaries. For next week’s Tending to Endings, I’d like to include some collective wisdom. If you have a story or experience about a death anniversary, I would love to hear from you. I’ve included more details at the end of this post.

I don’t know yet what we will do if anything on April 9, but I know I will be thinking of my mom because I think of her every day. I think of when she was well and I could lean into her wisdom and strength because I can use all of it I can get right now. And I think of how she was at the end, too, having lost her bearings, her body fragile, and yet somehow still grateful and funny and determined to go out loving. I do not want to forget her ending. It has been one of my greatest lessons about love and strength and intimacy. My mom was always my teacher and always will be.

This time last year, my mom moved into a hospital bed in the condo full time. She was no longer able to eat or drink or spend time on the lanai, though the slider in her bedroom allowed a wide view of the ocean. Blue was always her favorite color, and I was grateful she was surrounded by sea and sky.

This time last year, we knew any hour might be Mom’s last. My sister Sandy had just spent her spring break by my mom’s side, and my youngest sister, Amy, was about to arrive. I wrote this in my journal:

I am in the guest room of the condo and I hear the click-click-clicking of Mom’s fancy walker coming from my parents’ room. For a second, I get excited, thinking my mom is up and about, heading towards my room. Then I realized that it is—of course—my dad pushing my mom’s walker. He is storing it in the hall out of the way.
There is a day when you are sad that your mom has to use a walker. And then there is a day when you consider the sound of your mom’s walker coming towards you something to be thrilled about. Last week she was able to use that walker, and today, she is not.
Enjoy all of it. I remind myself.
Or maybe, not enjoy exactly, but love. Love that tonight I can sit with my mom and hear her breathe. And that today when I told her I loved her she smiled and nodded. And that tonight my dad and I watched the sunset from the lanai and talked about how we are sad.
It’s quieter with Bill and Sandy gone; I can get pretty serious, and my sister is good at making me laugh. Today it is harder to not focus on the losses. But my mom is here. And I am here. And my dad is here. And Sandy and Bill are on a plane over the Pacific. And Amy is almost here. And so many friends and family are holding us in their hearts.

All of It is no small feat, and probably impossible. I didn’t love lots of things about my mom’s ending. But I am so very grateful for the long moments I sat listening to her breathe, loving her.

I hope you will consider sharing your experience with anniversaries, whether the death was last year or many years ago. These can be traditions, or stories, things that surprised you. Ways of honoring the day, or just surviving it. Maybe the anniversary didn’t bring the expected emotion, or maybe there are things you wish you’d done differently. I’m not looking for one particular thing, but rather a wide range of experiences (All of it!), which I think could be helpful to others.

A sentence or a few sentences or a few paragraphs are all fine. Email to Laura@laurastavoe.com. Please let me know if you want your name or initials used, or if you’d prefer anonymity. I don’t know how many I’ll get (I hope, a lot!) or how many I’ll be able to include, but I will respond to your email either way before the post runs next week.

So do not tarry! And please do not worry about saying it perfectly. (Trust me, I know how that goes.) I can help with editing if you would like, but I think your voice and honest thoughts will make them just right.

If you prefer, you can also leave your response in comments below; I may still use it in next week’s Tending to Endings so that more people will get to see it.

Thank you so much for being part of this community.

Much love and strength to you and yours,

Laura

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March 6, 2020June 14, 2020

Early and Often

Tending to Endings (ten)

There is an internet meme that includes some version of the question, What would you do today if you knew you were going to die next week?

Sometimes I think our collective denial about death is so deep that we could just as easily say, What would you do differently if you knew you were going to die?

Eventually. Someday. Ever.

My own denial rears its head in interesting ways. As I’ve launched this project to study end-of-life matters and explore resources in my community, I occasionally worry that by paying attention to death I will somehow call it to me early. Plus, won’t people start thinking of me as that weirdo who is always wanting to talk about dying?

I believe in living for the day. I believe in putting energy into that which we can positively change. Why focus on the ending when there is so much that comes before?

The truth is I do believe there are times when blinders are helpful. One of the hardest things about being a caregiver to a loved one in serious decline is having to navigate our own grief while helping a person who is struggling as their body and brain give way. It is common to tell those caring for loved ones with Alzheimers not read ahead in the books about the disease because it will be too disturbing.

I can’t say I always disagree. At times I went into survival mode just so I had the energy to cope, knowing there will be time to process the myriad of emotions later.

But what if we didn’t wait until the end–or until we were in crisis mode over someone else’s ending–before we accepted that there would be one?

Of course we know we will die. But many of us have had that experience of knowing mortality differently, more deeply, after we brush close to death for one reason or another. I think my question is this–Would we benefit from rubbing up against death earlier and more often?

A few months after my mom died, I soaked in the hot springs in the mountains with my friends Mary Ellen and Malia, both of whom had also recently lost loved ones. We needed healing and a chance to talk with others who wouldn’t think it strange or shocking, all the details of death.

“We should get this information about dying much earlier,” I said. “It’s a lot, when you are grieving and making decisions about where to have your mother’s body cremated and finalizing insurance claims, to also come face-to-face with your own mortality.”

Mary Ellen’s eyes brightened, “Maybe it could come in an owner’s manual you receive upon birth: You are a mortal being. This body will breakdown at some point. Here are some helpful instructions! We could include a packet with advanced directives and options for what you’d like done to the body when you are through with it!”

I laughed. “Or maybe there should be a class in junior high?”

I think we sometimes assume we must have a major life altering event or a cancer scare in order to face our own mortality. And yes, that often works. But there are many cultures in which death is a presumed part of life.

A special issue of Yes! Magazine explores death and includes and overview of rituals and traditions of immigrants who bring the reality of death into everyday life. And as recently as a hundred years ago, family members of all ages had more opportunity to interact with those close to death even here in the U.S. because most people still died at home.

Krista Tippett, host of OnBeing recently was interviewed on Preach, and she spoke about attending Ram Dass’s final retreat in Hawaii a couple months before he died. Ram Dass had been living with the effects of a stroke for the last twenty years that interfered with his ability to move and speak. But he still ran retreats twice a year at his home, and these always included people who were chronically ill and near death. Tippett talked about why it was a profound experience for her to be with people who were actively dying:

It sounds strange to say, but it is incredibly life giving to have the fact that we will all die very openly in our midst, which just led to this really intense dwelling with what life is. And the other thing about this retreat that felt spiritually nourishing to me is that it was a really intergenerational gathering.

This intergenerational aspect is interesting to me because wouldn’t that be one way for all of us to overcome the collective denial of illness and death? To be around people who are near death at different stages of our lives.

There has been movement towards this in Alzheimer’s care. Some of the recent research about the mutual good of relationships between toddlers and Alzheimer’s patients has given rise to programs integrating nursery schools into memory care facilities.

Alive Inside, the documentary that won People’s Choice at Sundance in 2014, also has inspired a host of youth projects including pairing high schools with care centers for experiential based service learning. I’ve included a link to the trailer below, and I highly recommend the entire film.

I do believe we have something to gain in shedding our denial and making peace with death over a whole lifetime rather than seeing it as a task assigned upon getting a terminal diagnosis. In one of my favorite books covering this topic, Anam Cara, John O’Donahue makes a case for just that.

To continually transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that, at the end of your life, your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life the you have had; you will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your own nature.

One thing I know for sure having drawn close to my mother during her illness and her final days is that I am less afraid of death and more excited about life than I have been in a long time. This is not what I expected, but it is true. I love life more, and I’m less afraid.

Because of course even endings aren’t all bad. Once we learn we can stand them, we see a whole lot more, including the person we love, including beauty and life and grace, even in this.

Thank you for reading,

Laura

If you would like to receive Tending for Endings each Friday, please leave your email address below. It is ad free and cost free and I will not share your information. My aim is to help build community and conversation around end-of-life matters so we can better support one another. If you would like to leave comments and you don’t see a place to do so below, click here. You may also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

February 28, 2020June 14, 2020

Body of Grief

We have become death and grief illiterate, Sarah Chavez.

Tending to Endings (nine)

Last week, my sisters and father and my mom’s siblings gathered in Maui, which was the second place she wanted her ashes spread, the first being her garden at home near Chicago. My father said it was strategic on my mom’s part. She wanted all of us to have an excuse for another trip to Maui together. I am certain this is true—I can imagine my mom’s smile as she added this to the will, her giddiness.

I also know that Maui truly is sacred ground to my mom. Mom was very loyal to her true loves: my father for almost sixty years, Maui since their first visit in 1976, the color blue for life.

A lot happened during that trip that may be relevant for Tending to Endings. We had a second celebration of life for Maui Ohana that truly felt celebratory. People reminded us of Mom’s commitment to the children of the island and I thought a lot about legacy and about family, too, and how death reshapes relationships, deepens them.

But when I think about what might be most helpful to share, what I didn’t know ahead of time, it has to do with my mother’s remains.

Honestly, I did not expect the ashes to be much of a thing for me. I guess I thought they would be symbolic. I knew my mother was not experiencing whatever happened to her body after death. I had not given much thought to what happens to my own body after death, planning for cremation because it was affordable and would get the unpleasantness over with quickly.

And so it has been a surprise to me that after my mother died some of my most intense experiences of grief and disappointment and healing have had to do with her body.

In April when my father and I went to Nakamura mortuary, the attendant placed the cardboard box containing my mother’s ashes into my arms, and I was stopped short by the heaviness of the moment.

Grief was no stranger by then. I had been missing my mother ever since the Alzheimer’s took hold. It had been two years since I’d been able to call her to find out the name of name of a flower or to get her take on a book I was reading, or her advice on what to do next with my life. But this grief was different. It came on like the flu, so sudden and severe it made my bones and teeth hurt.

I cradled the box as we walked out to my dad’s convertible and I stood at the passenger door, not knowing where to place her. Not the trunk. The back seat? Should I belt her in?

Finally, I sat and held the box on my lap as my father drove us around the island following the shoreline my mother loved, looking out at the big blue sea, her absence resting against my womb.

I thought it was just her body. But, of course, it was my mother’s body.

The first time my father and sisters gathered to spread my mother’s ashes was four months later on what would’ve been my mom’s 80th birthday. Dad invited us to their Chicago home for hamburgers out on the terrace. After dinner, Dad brought out the cardboard box which contained the plastic container approved for air travel and a plastic bag with the remnants of my mother’s body. It was a lot of packaging to unravel.

My sister Amy asked if we should Facetime my aunt in Colorado. None of us was sure how to proceed. We wanted her to be part of things, but was it wrong to have a camera on the event? Amy shrugged and we called.

I suggested we find a hand trowel so we could till ashes into the soil, and then felt guilty for the suggestion. Was it uncouth to use a shovel? Was I just trying to avoid having to touch the ashes?

We stood in front of geraniums beneath the pear tree. We each took a turn, my sister walked around with the iPhone narrating for my aunt. I silently grew impatient with people for tossing but not tilling. My aunt suggested finding the patch of blue flowers for her scoop since blue was my mother’s favorite color. That seemed right, and I wished I’d done the same.

After we each took a turn, my dad put the box away. We went inside for dessert and my dad and my brothers-in-law talked about the World Series over beers.

When everyone had left, I asked my dad how he felt about the evening. “It was fine,” he said. “I guess I thought we would talk about your mom more than we did.”

Which was exactly how I felt, not that there was anything wrong with the process, but it had not felt all that connected to my mother.

Ash scattering is one more aspect of dying process that we tend not to talk about beyond logistics. What is often missing then is ritual or ceremony, and also the ease that comes when we are comfortable with an occasion. All of these can provide opportunities for connection. Most of us have attended a number of memorials and funerals and celebrations of life before we lose our parents. Most of us have not attended many (if any) ash scatterings or burials before we are responsible for conducting one.

Because I was not comfortable talking about what happened to my mother’s body, I was surprised by the intensity of emotion surrounding each encounter with her ashes. My mother’s body was not just a body. It was the body I had known as long as my own. It was the body that gestated and birthed and held and fed and bathed me. It was the body I eventually bathed. It was the body of my mother for 79 years. Her ashes are evidence of great loss.

Today I believe how we cared for that body at the end of my mother’s life and after she died when the hospice nurse came and we washed and and dressed her one last time and how we eventually came together around those ashes once again in Maui, all helped me and my family to mourn.

One of the things I did before the second trip to Maui was I talked to friends about their ash ceremonies. A friend of mine who recently lost her husband said she and her kids each wrote a letter to their dad and read them before scattering his ashes. This sounded helpful, like it would provide some opportunity for meaning making without being overly structured. My sisters and father agreed.

And then, when my sisters and father and I came together again in Maui, just like my mother planned, we talked about what we wanted, what we would do. It was a loose plan. My mom was not one for formalities.

The night before we discussed the pros and cons of various containers we found in the condo. My sister Sandy landed on a wedge wood blue vase made by one of my mom’s favorite artists on the island. We discussed the best way to get the ashes from the Ziploc baggies my dad used this time for travel through the narrow neck of the vase. Dad cut the corner of the bag to create a funnel and Sandy worked it like a pastry bag. She was very careful. We made jokes about how mom—who couldn’t stand cooking or any domestic chores—would never forgive us if she had to spend eternity in the grout of the kitchen tile.

In the morning, we walk to the shore before sunrise. The sky and the water are the pastel blue of a day about to open. Waves lap at our ankles. We read our love notes to my mom or recite what comes to our hearts. We laugh at my mom’s sense of humor when my aunt’s phone spontaneously begins jangling, playing “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams.

My voice cracks when it comes my turn to tell Mom, Thank you. Thank you for this father this family this life. My sisters reach around my shoulders, hold me. The sand of my mother mixes with my tears mixes with the sand of the sea. We are together, and I know, my mother has gotten her wish.

If you would like to receiving Tendings to Endings each Friday, please leave your name and email below. It is cost free, ad-free, and I will not share your info. My hope is to help build community and conversation around end of life matters. Please feel free to leave comments below or send your thoughts to laura@lauratavoe.com.

February 7, 2020June 14, 2020

I Hear You

Everyone likes to hear a good listener–Ron Stavoe

Tending to Endings (six)

One summer afternoon, my dad returned home to get ready for his summer job at the Pepsi-cola company. He was between his junior and senior year in high school. His sister Jeannine met him at the door and told him their mom died. The news caught him completely off guard.

My dad knew his mom was sick. She had been going to doctors since he was in the eighth grade. But no one had told him the illness was cancer, and always, always she was going to get better.

“I was a teenager and should’ve been smart enough to figure it out,” dad says, “My mom kept losing weight. She was sleeping in a cot in the living room because she was too weak to make it up the stairs”

I would describe my relationship with my dad as very close. And yet, it is December 2019 when my dad tells me about that day in 1956 that changed his life. I knew the fact of his mom’s death before that, but not the story. From the way my father reaches for details—”I came home from school…no, it was summer…I must’ve been out with friends.”—I don’t think he has told it often.

The degree of silence in my dad’s home was in part due to an era. But, even today there are not many places where it feels natural to launch into a conversation about someone who is about to die or someone who has. Counseling sessions and Death Cafes are two. Most celebrations of life, some funerals.

I was with a group of friends a few weeks after my mom died. I had just returned to Boise. It was a potluck for some occasion, a sunny spring afternoon. It felt good to be home and among friends after five months away. But I also felt that strange distance that trauma and loss can carve. I had been through something that was hard to explain even to myself. On any given day, I felt many things: grief, gratitude, relief, hurt, rawness, love, peace, exhaustion, numb.

My friend Kathy came up to me holding her cup of ginger tea, her blue eyes smiling and said, “Would you have time to meet for coffee sometime soon? I would love to hear more about your mom.”

What I felt then was a wave of relief. Pretty much all I could think about was my mom and all we’d been through over the past five months. I had been meting out small pieces of story to friends and anyone who would listen in order to not overwhelm any one person.

Often our reticence about death is good intentioned. We don’t tell because we don’t want to burden others with loss that feels heavy and disorganized and raw. We don’t ask because we don’t want to overstep or to awaken pain. I didn’t ask my father about his mother because I knew it would make him sad.

But how much else do we leave unsaid when we sidestep the whole story. As I’ve begun to make room for more of these stories in my own life–both the telling and the listening–I’m realizing quite a lot. Stories of death are, after all, actually stories about life. It’s the only part of death we actually know anything about.

Now, Kathy’s question seems perfect to me. Do you have time for coffee? I would love to hear the story. It did not feel intrusive, it felt like an invitation. We met the next week and I sat in my sunny living room and told her about my mom. It was a gift to be able to walk through that time again with someone listening.

In January I attended something called a Story Circle that was held downtown Boise in the Linen building and hosted by Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence. The topic of the circle was about heritage and we shared stories about the origin of our names and stories of our people.

One of the biggest gifts of the evening was feeling connected to people in my community who I had never met, and this happened for me, not so much through telling my story as through listening. Regardless of our ethnic or geographic background, as each person shared, I found those soft familiar places, those points of connection.

Last Christmas I finally asked my dad to tell me the story of my grandmother. And he did get teary, though mostly when explaining to me things about his mom that made him proud. She was active in local politics and president of the PTA and the leader of a kitchen band. “She was never angry, but she was always involved,” he says. “As soon as my dad came home, she would hand off responsibility of all of us to him and head out to some gathering or public meeting.”

“She influenced people,”he adds, “She would get my dad involved with things, saying, Art, why don’t you go talk to the kids at school about what you do at Crane Company. And he would.”

And I realize now that in this way, grandma was a lot like my mom. And dad and I talk about that rare quality some people have of being able to draw people to them, not with promises or persuasion or anything other than their own way of being in the world.

My mom would collect quotes she loved whenever she read–Henry David Thoreau and Marian Wright Edelman and Anna Quindlen and Wendell Berry. But one of her favorite quotes of all time was something my father said back when I was still in grade school, Everyone likes to hear a good listener.

And this seems ironic now, and like it has taken me a very long time to hear my father. When he finishes telling me about my grandmother I ask him to tell me about his father and I listen and I listen and I listen.

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