My paternal grandmother, Esther, was a tough cookie. Life circumstances made her that way. Her husband died before his fortieth birthday, leaving her to raise her three children during the depths of the Great Depression. She managed with ingenuity and with great self-sacrifice, receiving in return not only her children’s admiration, respect, and love, but their devotion, too. She got as good as she gave for as long as she did. Most unfortunately, she outlived each of her beloved children. With each death, she continued to live her hard-won life. And that she did just two months shy of her hundredth birthday.
Practical by nature, and theologically an Orthodox Socialist, she never turned to God to ask ‘why.’ “Life just happens the way that it happens,” she told me to comfort me at the time of my father’s – her son’s – death. This is not to say that she was ever sanguine. For Grandma Esther, the glass was always half empty. How could she think otherwise? But even in middle age, when her family was full, she would announce on Memorial Day, “The summer’s already half over.” On the Fourth of July, with a glass of seltzer in hand, she would toast to the summer’s end. Yet despite her justifiable pessimism, in July and August Sundays when our family would gather on the beach at the back of our lake-front shack in South Jersey, she would take the time to paraphrase the deity in whom she did not believe and declare, “This day was very good.”
My grandmother was no fool. She met life head-on, and like our biblical patriarch, Jacob/Israel, she wrestled it to the ground. Still, she managed to live life as fiercely as she confronted loss and death. Summer was her elixir, a seasonal respite that fueled her ability to live her life unaided by hope or by fantasy for almost a century.
With our world awhirl, it’s hard to stem the tide that threatens to overwhelm us on every front. I can refuse to watch TV, and I can trade NPR for WQXR, but the Times comes to the front walk every day. And that would be irresponsible for me to ignore. But when I go out to retrieve the paper from the front walk every morning at 5:30, come spring and though the summer, I see the runners running and listen to the songs of the birds and I pull a weed or two from the lawn, and I know that for those moments that life is, indeed, very good, too.
In the months to come, I wish you a good respite, even if it is only moments long.
With comfort and love,
Lee
