Grammy would have been 90 this week. We were going to celebrate her birthday today. Instead, we are here remembering her life, which she finished on Tuesday. There is much to remember and celebrate.
Grammy was a woman of faith and action who loved well. I have always wanted to be like her.
She was someone I could trust. I mean that in a deeper sense than simply being trustworthy, though she certainly was. More importantly, she was someone I could trust to live according to her beliefs. She had the courage and discipline to do the harder thing when she believed it was right — in both simple things and significant ones.
She believed she needed to exercise every day to care for her body, so she did. She believed she should refrain from offering unsolicited advice, so she refrained. She believed children needed a listening ear, so she positioned herself to listen to them, advocate for them, and walk alongside them, both professionally and personally. She believed the Bible provided the roadmap for life, so she read it every day. She believed prayer mattered, so she prayed — faithfully, every day.
She was a woman from a rural town who earned an Ivy League education in the 1950s. I always loved her stories. She liked to talk about serving as a waitress at a grand hotel where people from the city would come for the summer. She was a good student and a cheerleader in high school. By the time she became a nurse with a degree from Penn, she was married and expecting her first child.
She was a wonderful mother to her children. She was a nurse who cared deeply for many people, with a special love for children. She was incredibly intelligent and loved education, but even more than that, she loved people. She gave people her attention and listened well. Her bright blue eyes would light up during a good conversation, and you knew you had her full focus.
She was proud of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and she stayed actively involved in all of our lives. She showed up. She organized her life so that she had margin for hospitality, and she practiced it all her days. Grammy was a time person, and she gave her time generously.
Grammy taught me many things. I wanted to bake pies and cookies like the ones she was famous for, so she taught me. As a teenager, I wanted to learn to quilt, so she taught me. I wanted to know our family history, so she told me about it. I wanted to understand many other things, and she was always willing to share, offering honest and gracious assessments of people, memories, and systems. Like me, she hated injustice. She wanted every child to have every advantage.
And she kept learning. Every day of her life, Grammy was a learner. She wanted to understand things and was never the kind of person who assumed she knew everything. In these last few months, during the time we spent together, she asked me so many questions — about my work, about my children — caring question after caring question.
For me, she was a wonderful grandmother, a faithful example of a godly woman, and someone I loved very much.
