Grammy Dot

She was just fun. 

That's the one word you'd choose to describe her, if allotted just one, especially if you'd been around when she was playing with her granddaughters. Step-granddaughters, to be technical about it, but that's a distinction she never drew with our girls. And it definitely never occurred to them to think of her as anyone but their beloved, goofy, endlessly giving Grammy Dot.

She became my stepmom when she married my dad soon after I moved to Nashville to start grad school. I'd been away in school all during their courtship, which began not long after my parents divorced. Dad flew in to Nashville to give me the news of their impending nuptials, concerned about how I'd take it. 

She wasn't a stranger, she was the pleasant lady at the top of the street my parents had moved us to when I was just starting High School. My sisters and her daughters were friends. But I didn't really know her.

I got to know her and love her quickly enough, and over the ensuing years cultivated our common ground--baseball (her cousin was a former ballplayer, manager of the Cubs, general manager of the Mets), Mozart (I loved the piano concerti, she played them exquisitely), history (especially as related by Ken Burns), authentic St. Louis gooey butter cake, Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion (but not his politics, or mine--we knew where to draw the boundaries). 

And my dad, of course. They were a wonderful fit for each other, they both loved long (really long) driving tours of the country. They always made a point of passing through Nashville, whatever their destination. Mount Rushmore and the Badlands of South Dakota for the umpteenth time, the Pacific Northwest, Michigan's upper peninsula, wherever, all roads led to Tennessee. Especially after the grandkids arrived.

I'm so grateful for the visits Dot and I shared in recent years, after dad's passing, when I'd stop en route to my annual Kansas conference. She always had chocolate pie and coffee waiting. A nice ritual, a nicer memory.

Another enduring memory: Grammy Dot and the girls at the dining room table, playing cards or dominoes or some silly board game, none of them taking prisoners, locked in mock mortal combat, laughing, trash-talking, having the time of their lives.

I sent Older Daughter a postcard yesterday, with a quote from Jack London. It said simply: "I will use my time." 

Well, that she did. She answered a different call, not so wild, but what fine use she made of her time and ours. Thankfully for us, her time was more than double old Jack's. Wish it could go on and on. The lovely memory of her will go on and on with us. Thanks for the memories, Dot. You're unforgettable. You've shown us all how to go out swingin'.

 

Postscript. I've been honored with a request to share this at the funeral. Here's the preamble.

Good afternoon. I'm honored to have been asked to share a few words I've found consoling to write. 

This is a solemn occasion but, as you know, it was never easy to stay solemn around Dot for long--one of her many positive legacies. She well understood the wisdom often attributed (probably misattributed) to Dr. Seuss, don't cry becasue she's left, smile because she was here. Anyway, she's still here [❤]. But it's okay to cry. And smile. And celebrate this good life.

The feeling I find most appropriate to the occasion is deep gratitude, for all our improbable lives and today of course especially for hers. The merely-possible persons who might have been born in our place, it has been observed, outnumber the stars. We got to actually be here. With her. We are the lucky ones.

I teach (and study, and try to learn) philosophy. In my discipline we debate and discuss perennial questions like what more there may be to life and the universe than matter. Molecules in motion. Atoms and the void. Anything else? We’ve not settled that one yet. But I think the philosopher nailed it, who said:

"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after...That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities." Pragmatism, Lecture III

What good fortune to have known the beloved incarnation some of us called Grammy Dot.

Poet Jacqueline Berger, reflecting in her poem Why I’m Here on decades of family holiday gatherings, says it always felt like it would go on forever, that it could not be otherwise. But of course, days like this remind us, that feeling is wrong. This brief time we have together here is a gift. A treasure. 

Here, then, a few treasured memories of one of nature's better-realized possibilities...

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Dot’s obit in the StL Post-Dispatch… Baue Funeral Home

Post-postscript, April 6. The funeral was dignified and comforting, delivering these remarks was personally consoling and therapeutic, the livestream closed the gap between Missouri and California, the other eulogists were great. And the methodist minister was a philosophy student years ago with my old classmates and friends Mark, David, and Del. Small world after all.