Remembering My Grandmother
Thanks so much to @bluestreak23 for suggesting I write this!
I was writing the date on something this morning, and realized that today would’ve been my grandmother’s (the one I’m named for) birthday. I never really knew for sure when she was born but figured that with her being in her 80s when she passed away in 1976 (I remember because it was the week the Montreal Olympics started) it would probably be about her 115th birthday today if she were still here. So I went and grabbed the old family Bible out of the storage bin, and sure enough she was born on June 4, 1894.
I was only 14 when she died, and not on the best of terms with her. It was a time of real upheaval in my teenage life … I was going into grade 11 and we had just been moved from the house I grew up in to her house so that she could come and live with us. We were actually doing the last of our packing in preparation for the move when we got the call that she was gone. But that’s a whole different story.
Now that I’m so much older than 14, I realize not only how little I knew about my grandmother but also after having gotten a graduate degree in Canadian social history, I also realize just what an incredible woman she was to have lived through those times and stayed strong, and more importantly, true to herself.
I don’t even really know a lot about her life other than the tidbits my mother told me. She was born in 1894, married in 1915, widowed in 1926, and died in 1976. I know that most of her married years were spent in the U.S. because my mother was born in Detroit and didn’t become a Canadian citizen until the 1960s. I remember my mom talking about how they came back to Canada after her husband died and she went to work on the family farm cooking meals for the men (her brothers mostly as she was the second youngest of 13 children).
In the 1930s they moved into town and she took in boarders as a way to make ends meet. I vaguely recall her working as a clerk in the dry goods store when I was a little girl, but that’s a hazy memory at best.
It’s the thought of what she went through first working for her brothers, and then raising two children as a widow during the depression though that make me sit up and take notice now. After spending so many years reading and writing about early social policy and knowing how tough it was for single women right up until the post WWII era has given me a whole new understanding of why she was such a strong woman. I know my mom was terrified of displeasing her well into adulthood!
What is it about grandma’s kitchen that stays with you throughout your whole life? I don’t remember a lot about my childhood but two things stand out when I think of my grandmother, and they both have to do with food.
The first is raspberry tarts. They were always my favorite and she always had a batch for me whenever I went to visit. No matter what she baked for everyone else, I always got a plate of raspberry tarts and she would tell everyone that they were for me and to keep their paws off. :)
The second thing I remember is her coming to visit every Wednesday when I was little. Those were the days when stores still closed on Wednesday afternoons and she would come to town with my uncle when he went to work. She and I would then get on the city bus and go downtown to shop and have lunch at the cafeteria. I couldn’t have been anymore than 4 or 5 years old, but I still remember standing at the bus stop with her, and going to the cafeteria for lunch.
The only other thing I can remember about my grandmother is that she believed in me. She was so sure I was going to accomplish my goal of being a professional musician, she made sure that I had my own flute. There was never any doubt in her mind that I would play in a symphony one day and I remember when she gave it to me she told me that if I was going to be a pro, I needed to have a good instrument. It was the last physical gift she ever gave me.
It’s the intangible gifts she left to me, along with her name, that stick in my mind now. Her strength and ability to live life on her terms in a time when women weren’t supposed to be able to make it without a husband. Her deep sense of family and the love and protectiveness of her own that went soul-deep. When I think that life is hard now, all I have to do is remember my grandmother and her life and know that if she made it then, the least I can do to honor her name is to suck it up and be successful now.
It really bothers me, writing this, to realize how little I actually know about her. I wish that I could’ve gotten to know her better before she left us. I wish, given my love of history now, that I would’ve been able to capture her story because I know that my limited recollections just don’t do her justice.
