I started out with three grandparents. This was already below the standard average.
I can't say that I much noticed, though. For one, my father's parents had cable. They had Cartoon Express on the USA Network. They had Nestle Quik and about seven different kinds of cookie made with coconut. They had neighbor kids and lawn darts and Bactine.
There wasn't much more you could ask for. If I never really examined the two people at the center of this seasonal, alternative lifestyle, it's because I was too busy trying to ride a skateboard down the driveway like a bobsled.
My mother's father was the missing one and I suppose I didn't miss him myself because:
I never knew him, and
No one else seemed to miss him all that much, either.
There's the saying that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but no one really spoke about my other grandfather at all, which had the effect of making him seem like a person not worth remembering. To this day, as I sit here typing this, I genuinely cannot recall his first name.
So that accounted for the deficit, and also, I suppose, why it never felt like there was a deficit to begin with. Three grandparents, plus a fourth who - for me, at least - never existed. I liked those numbers. I was pretty satisfied with my below average count, all things considered.
In my handsome, freewheeling pre-teen years, the number somehow jumped to four.
It was addition by subtraction, in a way. My grandfather Ron left my grandmother Mary and remarried, which netted me a third grandmother: Debbie. Mathematically speaking, I was flying high. It wasn't exactly the complete set everyone else seemed to have, but the numbers didn't lie. A spare Debbie was nothing to sneeze at.
And what was Debbie, precisely? Pretty much the living, breathing antithesis of my grandmother. Louder, fuller, drunker. My grandmother was a straight line: thin, rigid, unchanging. Even her long fingernails were especially unyielding, which I know because she would routinely wrap them in tissue and attempt to jam them through the back of my brain. But Debbie? Debbie would never try to take my boogers by force.
Debbie was the cool grandma. Debbie would crack jokes and let me steer a moving car while she wrestled the cap off a lukewarm beer. My grandmother hardly ever endangered our young lives in such a chill and grossly negligent way.
When the wedding suddenly happened, it may have seemed like things were moving quickly, but in reality my grandfather had long ago created something like a second life with Debbie. Divorcing my grandmother and marrying Debbie was just a natural endpoint to this new story my grandfather was writing for himself.
A happy ending in his story. An inciting incident in everyone else's.
But at least on that wedding day, it felt like the circle was expanding. Three grandmothers. One Grampie. If nothing else, I was pretty convinced that Christmases were going to be off the chain.
Christmas, however, remained firmly on the chain.
While we would occasionally visit Grampie and Debbie in the first few years after the divorce, that relationship quickly became distant. Outwardly, it seemed like my grandfather was deferring the remainder of his old familial relationships to my grandmother, who had - and I do not say this lightly - basically lost her mind.
I don't know if there were signs that my grandfather had been unfaithful, but it's very clear that my grandmother hadn't seen any of this coming. In the years after the divorce, she floated through life like the ghost of a Victorian era widow, ever pining for her lost Ronnie. For a few years at least, my sister and I continued to make the trip to Patten to spend summer days with her, but now those days were routinely punctuated by weeping fits and uncomfortable conversations about what an awful woman that Debbie was.
My grandmother, perhaps to her lifelong detriment, had always been extremely concerned with the look of things. She wasn't one to curse or argue in front of the kids. She was, by self-imposed design, a model of benign civility.
But of course, that was the outside. The inside was a bit more complicated.
Eventually - perhaps inevitably - my grandmother punched Debbie in the eye at a funeral, which is around when we started seeing a lot less of my grandfather, and also a bit less of my grandmother.
Again, I think at the time this felt a bit like my grandfather ceding our family to my grandmother, like some out of court settlement, but in reality, I think my grandfather felt badly about a mixture of choices he'd made. Or maybe he was simply ashamed of the person who'd made those choices. I don't really know.
For me, it felt like the number had dropped from four to two. Or, more accurately, 1.75. But that was just a feeling. The number was four, for a good long number of years.
There's an inherent spoiler warning in every story dealing with old people: they are going to die. No one has yet figured out a way to avoid this particular narrative cliche.
My grandfather officially left my life in 2015. Years of hard labor and cigarette smoking had left him frail and struggling for air. I did get to visit him that summer, a few months before he passed. We didn't talk about all that much (talking was a chore in his condition), but he did get to meet the woman who would eventually become my wife and, in a way, just being in his presence for an hour or so felt like something. It didn't make up for anything. It was just a single visit in a 35 year relationship. But it was something.
Living so far away from the bulk of my family, I'm occasionally asked to write something for the funerals I can't attend. Here's what I wrote for Ron Campbell's funeral:
I don’t have many memories of my grandfather, but when I think of him he’s wearing a short-sleeved button-up shirt, open at the collar, with a pack of cigarettes in his front pocket. Sometimes he’s got a baseball cap on, sitting way, way back on the edge of his crown. He always seemed to be talking out of the side of his mouth, like John Wayne in an old western.
He was a truck driver right up until his body wouldn’t let him be that anymore, so that’s usually how I think of him. My grandfather, the truck driver. That truck largely defined him for me, partially because it took up so much of his life, but also because I didn’t have much else to go on. I remember him showing my sister and me the inside the cabin when we were little. There was a little pull down bed in there. I thought that was awesome, but that’s because I was a kid and kids thinking sleeping anywhere that isn’t your bed is awesome. Looking back, it was probably wretched. Not just the sleeping, but the whole thing. Driving all day (and sometimes all night), racing against deadlines, living haul to haul, spending so much time away from your family.
There’s a Ray Bradbury story that always makes me think of my grandfather. It’s called “The Rocket Man” and it’s about an astronaut who works for three months in space, then returns home for three days, before heading back into space. When he’s in space he dreams of coming home and being with his family. When he’s home he dreams about returning to space. Every place he goes he feels the joy of where he is and sadness of where he isn’t.
I don’t know what my grandfather felt when he was home or when he was on the road, because we never really talked once I was old enough to wonder about these kinds of things. I know he loved his kids and his grandkids and his nieces and nephews and on and on because it was written all over his face. I know he felt sorrow that he could never quite shake. I know he worked hard.
I don’t know much else. And selfishly, that may be what I’m the most sad about. I saw my grandfather very rarely, but I remember a time, 10 or 15 years ago, when I saw him at my uncle’s house. I don’t remember much of what was said, but I do remember this look he gave me. He looked like someone who had a thousand things to say and just couldn’t bring himself to start. When I saw him again this summer, he was too physically deteriorated to do much talking at all. So whatever he wanted to say will never be said, and that makes me sad. Because he was a well-traveled man with a sharp sense of humor. He was a father and a husband; a Mainer and yeah, a truck driver, too. Stripped of all that, though, he was my grandfather. He loved me for simply existing. And though I probably did a poor job of expressing it, I loved him right back. I’m sad that we’ll never have that conversation I think we both secretly wanted to have, but I’m glad his suffering is over. In my mind, he’s delivered his last haul, and now it’s time to finally go home and get the rest he worked so hard for.
If you owned stock in Jesse Campbell's Grandparents, January 2020 would have been a good time to sell. The coronavirus pandemic wasn't kind to anyone, especially the elderly, and especially my elderly.
All I know is that I started the last year of my 30s with a respectable, if underwhelming two and a Debbie grandparents and entered my 40s with only a Debbie to my name. This is what financial experts call a bear market.
It would be unfair to blame the deaths of my remaining grandmothers exclusively on COVID-19. Eleanor didn't catch it at all, though it played a role in her final days all the same.
Eleanor was easily the loudest person I ever met. I don't mean that she spoke especially loudly (although she did that, too), but that she lived loudly and proudly. She loved attention, and, in fairness, she earned hers fair and square by being the funniest, most interesting person in the room. She loved a good story - all the better if she was the one telling it, but good all the same if she was just a member of the audience. As the world changed, she changed too, learning new technology and happily stumbling her way across social media just so she could stay connected.
She just got old. Her ears went, and so did her eyes. She used the latest hearing aids, cranked so high you heard an echo when you talked. She sat inches away from computer monitors the size of bay windows and used e-readers that were bigger than a butcher block. They bought her a few more years on Facebook, but eventually she just couldn't see and couldn't hear. Then the pandemic hit and she was stuck in a nursing home, alone and bored and frustrated.
Effectively, she died of not particularly wanting to be alive anymore.
Here are the remarks I didn't deliver at the funeral I didn't attend in the middle of a pandemic I didn't especially enjoy:
Eulogizing Eleanor Sargent is an act of futility. The fact of the matter is that there isn’t anything I could say about my grandmother, her life, and her accomplishments that the woman herself couldn’t have said better, louder, and with a binder full of newspaper clippings to prove the point.
That said, there are many facets of my grandmother that I will always remember and cherish. She was a wonderfully blunt educator, always happy to answer all the medical questions you never asked, including where a catheter goes and how a mammogram works. It didn’t matter how old you were or how much you would have preferred to live in ignorance. If you met Eleanor Sargent, you were going to learn something - about her life, about the world, and very likely about how to lance a boil. But you would be better - if not a little scarred - from the experience.
She was also a fearless chef, bravely overcoming what I have always assumed was a lifelong inability to taste food. If it could be boiled, it could be breakfast. If it could be pickled, it could be lunch. If it didn’t have marshmallows in it, check again. My Uncle Paul always used to say, “Every meal is a banquet.” With Nannie, every meal was a magic show and the trick was on your taste buds. But you couldn’t say that the food wasn’t made with love. And you could always eat around the burned bits.
But the thing that has always and will always connect me with Nannie is stories. Eleanor was a master storyteller. Among many other things, she taught me that the telling is everything. Good stories don’t need action or drama or shocking twists, they just need those one or two details that bring it all to life.
“I was born on a cold, blustery day,” she once wrote. “And I was ugly. It’s a wonder they didn’t throw me away.”
A good story doesn’t have to go anywhere in particular - it just needs to take you along for the ride.
It helps, though, to have the kind of enthusiasm for remembering that Nannie brought to every tale and every telling. She could tell the same stories about terrorizing poor Aunt Grace or her mother’s brutal, eternal rivalry with an ornery old ram a thousand times and every time would be like the first, for you and for her.
What I couldn’t appreciate then and can only begin to understand now, is the way that every separate telling pumped a little more life into those stories. Stories have the power to outlive us all, but only as much as they’re told and remembered. Among all the good that Nannie did in her life (and there was plenty), I’m most struck by all the people and places and moments she has kept alive through her passion for telling a good story. Trilby the Dog has been dead for at least 80 years, but as long as I remember how he taught baby Eleanor to walk and about the time he got confused during an eclipse and brought the cows in at noon instead of dusk, he lives on.
I’m sad that my grandmother is gone. And I’m sad that she couldn’t be here today, because let’s be honest - I’m not sure anyone would enjoy a celebration of Eleanor Sargent’s life more than Eleanor Sargent. The world is an indisputably less colorful place without her.
But the stories live on - both the stories she told and the stories she created by living such a full and memorable life. So I ask that you tell her stories. And that you tell your own. Just be sure to lean in close when you tell them (whether you can hear just fine or not) and laugh out loud at all the best bits.
And if you want to toss a few marshmallows in your next casserole, I’m sure Nannie would approve.
My grandmother Mary actually did die of COVID-19, ironically in between her first and second dose of the vaccine. Unlike Eleanor, whose mind never seem to deteriorate even as she lost her ability to communicate, Mary spent her final months largely unaware of the when, why, where, and how of her day-to-day life. She couldn't remember where she was and what had become of her many, many deceased siblings.
In the midst of the pandemic, the only safe way for my father to visit her was by standing outside her window and calling her on the phone. He declined, because just having a normal, face-to-face conversation had already become a baffling chore for her. The added layers ("What are you outside?" "Why are you calling me on the phone when you're right here?" "When did you get so old?") seemed more cruel than anything else.
But then she got sick. And then she was gone.
I like to think that if Mary had kept her wits, she would have known that if she passed away she would have left me with only a Debbie to my name. A lucid Mary would have remembered that she was in a death race she couldn't afford to lose. And I like to think she would have made it through.
But that's not how things turned out.
No one asked me eulogize Mary, and I don't have it in me to do that right now, so I don't have anything especially thoughtful to say. I loved her. She loved me. I can't say that we were close, but I'm not sure if that's because of her or me or something else entirely.
The woman sure did drag a lot of boogers out of my face over the years, though. That's gotta count for something.
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