Eulogy for Gram...

...from Us.

"We want to talk a little about memory today. We want to talk about memory because, as most of you know, in the last few years of her life, our Grandmother lost much of her memory to Alzheimer's. Much of the time, she could not remember us, her beloved family and friends. On very bad days she could not remember even herself. It seems fitting, then, to honor her memory with remembrance and recollection.

You are a girl. There is the fresh sweet taste of still-warm milk on the farm; the family of skunks befriended one summer and visited every day in the fields; being scolded by your mother, our great grandma Gladys, for mussing the dress and Mary Janes you are forced to wear, even though you are a tomboy and invariably prefer trousers. The dresses never stop you from climbing every tree. You skin your knees. The patent leather shoes lie in a heap in the mud. You love your daddy, Freeman Ordway, and he adores you above all else.

There are near death experiences as a child, later retold with humorous sensationalism to wide-eyed grandchildren: a lightening strike on the house, with your hand just a few inches away from the post of a cast-iron bed, sheets scorched; an amusement park accident with a collapsed chair swing, returning the next day to find eyeglasses crunched next to a giant, steel support beam.

Later, as a teenager, you are carousing with Curly, with Vince, and your "gang" of friends, everyone smoking and drinking, all packed to overflowing in your cars and always going to country dances the next town or county over.

There is Curly, our grandpa, Clarence Richard Hooper, the love of your life. You go all over New York, Pennsylvania, and even Canada, to explore your love of music, especially organs and organ music. There are three children, first Douglas, then Donald, our father, and finally a girl—Martha. There are swimming trips and picnics. Silverware sewn to napkins with fine silver thread as an April Fool's prank. Piano lessons, Girl Scouts, county fairs, train exhibits, and home-sewn costumes. Vegetable gardens, perennials, annuals, iris beds, saplings, and raspberry canes. A pet bunny carried in your apron pocket. Beloved dogs Lady, Mugsy, Joey, Nicky, Mokey, Macduff, and Duffy. Cats too numerous to name. You are always scanning the skies—in the day for birds and at night for constellations, shooting stars, meteor showers, and eclipses. Your children grow. There are weddings and divorces. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Accounting class, pottery class, basket-weaving class. Lifetime subscriptions to Smithsonian, Nature, National Geographic, and Scientific American. Countless books and more books.

Later, when Curly retires, you come home every day at your lunch hour, from your job at the gas company, to make him lunch. This works out very well for Grandpa, since you are off from 12 to 1, Price is Right ends at noon, and Days of Our Lives starts at 1, so he has an hour free in his afternoon schedule. You have lunch together every single day. Many years later, after Curly's death, you play for me and my husband a record of organ music and recollect emotionally how this particular organist's hands remind you so much of Grandpa's when he played. It is the only time I have ever seen you cry, remembering your husband's hands and how they danced over the keys.

Then there are our own memories of you, like the flickering 5-4-3-2-1 countdown before an old black and white movie: the smell of fresh molasses cookies and the POP! of the cookie jar seal, or of fabric softener sheets, tucked into musty old volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

There are old margarine containers, holding red coins from Michigan Kitty, orphaned boardgame pieces, or leftover cinnamon apples after Thanksgiving. There is a freezer full of pinkish applesauce in square Tupperware, TV dinners, orange push pops. Dead birds in plastic bags you rescued from the driveway or from the radiator grills of parked cars, and froze so you could examine them later.
There's the sweet treat of Lifesavers tucked neatly into the corner of the electric organ, a hideaway for mixed fruit, wintergreen, butterscotch. The measure of a perfect dollop of pear and fig filling in the center of a cookie. Angel food cake upside down, waiting to cool, ready to cover with sugared strawberries, handpicked raspberries, or to eat plain, with our fingers, swinging together on the back porch.

There is the taste of Dr. Pepper, which we bought with extra quarters you brought just for me, and sipped from fat glass bottles in the laundromat, waiting for the wash to dry, swinging my feet in the plastic chairs when my legs were too short for my feet to touch the ground.

There’s the smell of paper and ink, a dull brass key held tight in my hand, sweaty with responsibility as I move with purpose toward your Fillmore post office box, Number 51.

We traipse through Southern Tier cemeteries to find graves of long lost relations, Val and I gathering the discarded plastic flowers for our own morbid collection; we stand in the big farm kitchen, learning how to spoon flour into a measuring cup and scrape the excess with the flat back side of a knife. There are candy hunts on Easter morning with personalized riddles leading the way to each sugary treat. We are hunching over the dining room table over baking and science and sewing projects. We are reading Mary Jemison's autobiography together and then leaving flowers at her grave in Letchworth Park.

There’s me, leaning on the doorframe of your bedroom downstairs, watching as you ready yourself for a grocery trip "downtown." First, Listerine, then a thorough brush through your long, grey locks, carefully separating it into an even part, then braided and pinned neatly to your head until the braids meet, then cross, in the middle, ends tucked in. All this held in place with the familiar spray of White Rain Extra Hold. A quick flash of a toothy smile into the mirror to double-check. A tug of the shirt to straighten it out, wisping away any stray animal hairs. Perfection.

I am eight, and it is summertime and we are with you during summer vacation, like every summer before. It’s humid and sticky out during the days, but at night the air is biting and cool. You set up lawn chairs in the back yard and tuck us in up to our chins while we watch for shooting stars. For each one we see, you ask us to say a wish out loud. I thank the stars for you. Before bed time, you bring us mason jars to collect lightening bugs, and we marvel at them glowing inside the jars and in suspension above the irises. Before we sleep, we open the lids and release them into the night air. We whisper, “Goodbye. And thank you.”

You are calling to the chickadees, listening to the quiet whirr of hummingbirds in flight. You reply to each piercing squawk of the nearby cardinal or jay. You laugh when I shave my fingernail into the batch of butter pickles we are making. This summer, there's a litter of bunnies borrowed from a farmer friend, on loan just for us.

Finally, here I am, tucked into bed in my own father's childhood room, the room where I was brought first as an infant, just back from the hospital. It's a few years later, I am bundled under high quilts with stories—House at Pooh Corner. Later again in the bed, as a teenager, exhausted from a night of late talking or rummy. Finally, in the end, as a woman, with my husband beside me. You kiss us both, tuck us in, like children, then go singing down the stairs and into the night.

Thank you, Gram. Thank you for your memory. "