Just a Little Woman

Written on an airplane on Friday, July 10.

When my son Erik first met his grandmother at the age of 30 - and why he would meet her at that age is a story for another day - he asked me, “Why is everyone so afraid of Granny? She is just a little woman, and now she is growing old.”

As he came to know her, Erik learned what the rest of us already knew - Granny was in charge. She ruled by a combination of organization and hysteria. As long as everyone did what she said, when she said it, all was well, If not, she used her prodigious energy to let everyone know how unhappy she was, No one could rail louder or cry longer than my mother. It will come as no surprise that the unspoken family rule when I was growing up was,” Don’t upset your mother.

She could also be a lot of fun. She particularly enjoyed her children one on one, preferably over a Bourbon Old Fashioned - or two. And if yours was more full than hers, she might “get confused” and help herself to it. She would tell long stories about her childhood and the generations of her family. About riding the train from Nebraska to Illinois. Alone. When she was five. About how she was allowed to eat the lumps out of the brown sugar crock when she visited Aunt Glen. About the woman who named her first daughter Amelia and when she died as an infant, used the same name for her second daughter. Who also died.

People are never all one way, never all good or all bad. As my mother’s memory began to fade and she could no longer control everything and everybody in her orbit, the happier memories of growing up with her began to drift back. I am grateful for that time.

The force that was my mother, or “The Matriarch,” as she called herself, departed this world Wednesday morning. She was, at the end, just a little woman, surrounded by her family. She died soon after her family had sung to her the song she had sung to us as children, “Over in Killarney, many years ago. . . Tura, lura, lura. Tura lura lie. Tura, lura, lura. Hush now don’t you cry . . .”