On Grandma Marlene

Grandma Marlene was, to use my generation’s parlance, iconic. Most visually through her hair.

Short and upright and, for I think all the time I knew her, a dazzling white, Grandma’s hairstyle never went out of style. Whether this was a reflection of her or the hair is better left to judges not myself. In all 52 pictures shared of her on the cousin group chat the other day, the hair is the same, and those pictures might not span half of that haircut’s life. She was once—and this is technically true—recognized in a small town in Germany by her hair.

Grandma’s hair never changed, and neither did she, in many ways. Sure, she adapted as she got older. She’d been using an iPhone for a few years by the time she died. But so many things about her were constants: The color of her walls and carpets. Her water bottle with the built-in straw. The way she wrote the word “and,” a diagonal break from her horizontal cursive, most memorably located at the bottom of birthday cards signed, “Grandpa Jim and Grandma Marlene.”

She and Grandpa Jim were a great pair. An hour and a half south of us, growing up, they lived in a sturdy stone house on the corner of Main Street in Morris, Illinois, easy walking distance from downtown. Visits there were a sensation. There were sugar cookies and games and lemonade, and there was a ping pong table in the basement next to Grandpa’s model train layout, and the walls and the cubbies were full of things they’d brought back from their travels all over the world. One hundred countries. Seven continents. One coffee table decoration of petrified dung (that was Grandpa’s—not produced by him, I mean, but procured).

It was, as a kid, a wonderland. It tracks, now, writing this, that my mother—Grandma Marlene’s daughter—looked for a house worthy of hosting grandchildren as she observed her own impending empty nest. Visits to Grandpa Jim and Grandma Marlene’s house were an event. What more could a grandchild want? What more could a grandparent hope to achieve?

Those visits hit different when visits came on Corn Festival weekend. Sight of the John Deere dealership, the landmark welcoming visitors from the north on Route 47, provoked elation from the backseat any time of year, but should we drive down on that Friday in September, we knew we were getting Morris at its best. There’d be the soapbox derby. There’d be the photography competition. On one of the last visits, when we were older, there was even live music down by the canal.

The house, of course, was nice but none too special. It was Grandma and Grandpa who were special.

It’s funny, when someone dies, how the breadth of your memories widens out before you. I’ve thought of Morris more these last few weeks than I had since, well, since Grandpa died.

When Grandpa died, the funeral was still in Morris. They’d moved up to Barrington, what was it, five years earlier? His Parkinson’s was getting worse, and Parkinson’s does not really tend to get better. They moved into a retirement community, into their own apartment, where the colors matched the house on the corner of Main Street. A lot of the décor came from there too. But it was different, and when Grandpa needed a move into the memory care unit, there were worries that Grandma would be bored in this more isolated world. The place was beautiful, but it was set apart, separated from the town’s main thoroughfare by a pond with a great big soaring fountain. It was not on the corner of Main Street.

Grandma never changed, but we saw her from more angles over the years. She thrived there in Barrington. Her funeral, later today, will be in Barrington.

What we learned about Grandma, or at least what I learned, over the decade following Grandpa’s death, was how much she loved to care for people. I’d thought this had more to do with Grandpa, back when she was caring for him. It seemed grueling for her to give him up to memory care, and to my teenage eyes, it seemed she was only willing to do it when it was painfully clear that was necessary. Of course, there was a specific intensity to that care. But the woman did love to care on folks.

I do not know how many cups of custard Grandma made for her sick and injured neighbors in that retirement community, and I do not know how many cookies Grandma brought to the doormen and the painter and the women at the front desk. I would need a business student well versed in the how-many-tennis-balls-can-fit-on-an-airplane interview question to help me figure it out. It was constant, and while part of this was a product of her boundless energy (and I mean boundless—she was described many a time as a “force of nature,” sometimes wearily), it was also how she loved, with the astonishing part how broadly and widely and generously that love expanded. Her hospice care was behind the retirement community, and one day during the week she lay there unresponsive at the end, the painter came. He brought blue and green flowers. He was the painter, after all—he knew her favorite colors.

Grandma’s habits of caring were a responsibility to her. They were not acts of generosity, at least from her point of view. She was simply doing the things she felt herself supposed to do. This was how she approached a lot of her life. She served as an elder, among many other roles, at her Presbyterian church. She served on the boards of charities. She served cookies to the grandkids.

She was generous, too, at least to us grandchildren, and to our spouses, and to her two little great-grandchildren. I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect she was generous to Grandpa’s caregivers as well. One called my uncle, while he was sitting there at the hospice facility with her. Ten years later, a new set of goodbyes.

Grandma was not someone to ostentate her generosity. She went about this chivalry in a quiet way. This was very Presbyterian of her. It was also very Midwestern. She told me once, talking of how my mom had been born in California, how she and Grandpa decided they wanted their kids to grow up with Midwestern values, and so they moved back. She was born in the small town of Sycamore, Illinois. She died thirty miles away, in the village of Barrington, Illinois. She spent the bulk of her life in Morris, about 45 miles south of Sycamore. It doesn’t feel quite that far out in the country.

From Sycamore, and Morris, and even a little bit from Barrington once she got her travel legs back under her after Grandpa’s passing, she went to the furthest reaches of the world. She saw penguins in Antarctica. She and Grandpa lived, when he was in the Air Force, in the Azores. She traversed Tibet and she rode the rivers of the Brazilian rainforest. I think she and he even made it to Timbuktu. She had the resources, clearly, to live more lavishly than she did (though the retirement community was a nice one). But she lived in her small towns. She liked her Presbyterian churches.

Grandma was the kind of person who keeps small towns humming. She was the kind of person people are talking about when they talk about the good old days. Even in the retirement community, even when she’d slowed down and her posture was a little bent, she was doing the small town things. She was saying hi to every soul in the hallway. She was bringing custard to her neighbors who were ill.

Born in December of 1935, she was 86 years old when she left us, back on the 27^th. It’s hard to say it when someone got so close to 90, but she died young. Her eyesight had deteriorated, and she was in pain, but her mind was so very sharp. I always figured we’d get one hundred years out of her, but cancer had other plans.

Grandma Marlene was a wonderful grandmother. She was always so happy around us grandkids, and for the four of us lucky enough to be married in her lifetime, she adored our spouses. She lit up when talking about each of them. She lit up when talking about most anything, though, to be fair.

I don’t exactly know the specifics on this, but I was told once that when she and Grandpa had both died, she would be cremated as he was, and that their kids will take them back down to Morris, where the I&M Canal passes alongside the Illinois River. There, they’ll be tossed into the river’s waters, which will take them to the Mississippi. From the Mississippi, of course, they’ll go down to the Gulf, and from the Gulf, of course, they’ll travel out around the globe, their physical forms spending eternity the way they spent their time alive, exploring.

When my mom was a kid, her folks would take these big trips right when school got out, driving all over the Western United States. They’d drive, and they’d camp, and they’d swim, and they’d explore. This was, very firmly, still the era of paper maps, and there’s a story about my grandpa opening a map and saying to a friend, “I’m a traveler in heat!”

I like to think, as Grandma steps into the cosmos, that Grandpa Jim is there waiting. That he’s opening a map. That he’s taking her hand, saying, “Come on, Marlene. I’m a traveler in heat!”

We’ll love you forever, Grandma.

We’ll thank you forever.

Bon voyage.