“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”
Emily Dickinson
The first Christmas of my life is captured in a photograph—me, my mom, a couple of her sisters, and her mom, my nana. It was near the end of World War II and all the men in the family were away in the military. I’m the only one in that photo still alive.
Most of my childhood Christmases after that first one involved a visit to my grandma and pop pop’s house. They were my dad’s parents and their home was a gathering place, not only on holidays, but also on every Sunday after church. The living room walls, fireplace mantel, and radiator covers were filled with family photos. The gatherings included my parents and siblings plus my dad’s four brothers, their wives and children. Only my brothers, sisters and a few cousins remain.
Pop-Pop was the first one in the family whose death I remember and mourned. I was about ten years old when he passed. He was a former riverboat man from upstate New York, a tugboat captain, and tall-tale teller. He seemed larger than life. I remember him as gruff but a softie. I never witnessed his addictive nature, the reason Grandma kept an alcohol-free home, but he did smoke cigarettes. A floor-standing ashtray was always positioned next to his wooden rocker in the living room. I don’t ever recall him in casual dress. When he relaxed, he wore dress pants with suspenders, a white dress shirt, and often, a tie.
Grandma was a tiny bird of a woman who emigrated from Ireland on her own at the age of sixteen. She was kind, loved African violet plants, grew rhubarb in her garden, and used a toast rack on her breakfast table, a curiosity I had never seen before. She always wore a dress and often, an apron. During World War II, she was considered a Gold Star Mother because she had five sons in the military. She and Pop-Pop celebrated fifty years of marriage together, but she outlived him by fourteen years. She had a soft spot for me because I was the first girl born into the family since she lost her own first child, a daughter who died as an infant. I was twenty-four when she died.
My Nana was New York born, a descendant of Irish immigrants. She was a constant presence in my early life. I lived with her as an infant and either lived across the street from her or in the neighborhood until I married. As a child, I loved cutting paper dolls and coloring with her. She loved to talk, sing nursery rhymes and Irish songs, and always made time to listen. She also liked to play “the numbers,” which would involve a visit to a woman named Flossie. Like my Grandma, she always wore dresses, often with aprons. I remember, as do all of her grandchildren, her delicious banana cake with cream cheese icing, a recipe she kept in her head. She lived with her oldest daughter and her family for all the time I knew her, and I always assumed she was a widow. When I was twenty years old, I learned that her husband, my maternal grandfather, had recently died. I had never met him, and I later learned he walked out on Nana and their children almost thirty years before. Nana was my only grandparent to live to attend my wedding. She died when I was almost twenty-eight. Sad to say, it was two months before my first child was born, an event she’d been looking forward to.
My dad had an excellent vocabulary, liked long discussions about current events after dinner, taught me to appreciate good table manners and was kind and honest. He was fun to ballroom dance with and smooth on his feet. He hated garlic and liked vodka gimlets. He taught me to play tennis, took me for Sunday morning swims at the public pool, and loved riding the waves with me on rubber rafts at the Jersey shore. He earned a full athletic scholarship to college where he became somewhat of a football legend but never talked about it himself. In later years, he was inducted into his school’s athletic hall of fame. He was a World War II veteran who was a staff sergeant and radar specialist. Before he was drafted into the Army, he worked as an engineer for Douglas Aircraft in Eritrea, Africa. After the war, he worked in Manhattan, and when I was in college, I enjoyed meeting him for lunch at Sloppy Louie’s at the Fulton Fish Market. He was a night owl, and when I got home late, tired from hours of studying and working part-time jobs, he’d rub my aching shoulders and we’d talk. In retirement, he served as head of a local Junior Achievement program. I was sixty when he died.
My mom loved to talk and to shop, and I made many excursions into Manhattan with her. She was proud of the fact that, as a young woman, she could fit into designer sample sizes. She loved holidays and birthdays and made them memorable for me and my siblings. She always took an interest in my homework and taught me silly rhymes to help me remember facts. She spent hours preparing me for spelling bees. As a girl and young woman, she became an accomplished tap dancer, progressing from a local dance school to being accepted as a student in Manhattan with the legendary stage and screen performer/ producer Sam Burns. At the age of nineteen, she won a competition and danced in a show at Billy Rose’s Aquacade at the New York World’s Fair. As I and my siblings were growing up, she was active in our elementary school’s Mother’s Guild, at one point becoming its president. In later years, she enjoyed writing poetry and had three poems published locally. I was 65 when she died.
These five people were the backbone of my life, but the two sides of my family were each large and I was fortunate to have been surrounded by many adult relatives whom I loved.