Saturday 29 March 2025

As a daughter, a granddaughter and a genealogist, I have often wondered what the women who came before me would think about our lives as they exist now. During the COVID-19 pandemic I began to give more time and voice to those wonderings, for instance asking my husband, “How would your mom respond to this crisis? Do you think she would be more inclined to follow the isolation recommendations, or to scoff at them and go for coffee at Sneaker’s every morning anyway?” My mother-in-law passed away in 2014, less than a year after her lung cancer diagnosis, after more than twenty years without a cigarette. Then I started to think about my grandmothers. What would they have done? Now I think about that sort of thing all the time. What would my grandmas think, if they knew now about how I’ve raised my children? About how I run my household? About how we take care of our parents? About where and how we travel? About the friendships we maintain, and the family relationships we maintain – and the ones that have fallen away? About what is going on in our towns and states and nation? What would their mothers and grandmothers think?

 

My maternal grandma was born in 1918, right in the middle of the Spanish flu pandemic. She passed away in 2009, from pneumonia and congestive heart failure. Her mother died when she was 33, her father when she was 41, and her husband when she was 58. She had six children, fifteen grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren when she died. Even when she lived in a nursing home the last four years, she was still mentally sharp and had a good memory for people and things that had happened in her life. She used to tease my husband because he “couldn’t hold down a job,” even though she knew his work in the information technology sector was not the same as most careers as she had always understood them. She was born in northwestern Ohio, and her father took his family to northeastern Indiana when he left farming to work on the railroad. I think she was mostly a city girl while growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana; she left school at 15 or 16 to support her family during the Depression. She would occasionally tell the story about being the only one in the local general store when John Dillinger came in to buy bullets, which she had to get out of the store’s safe to sell to him. She would always end that story by saying, “He had a very nice suit.” She was working at General Electric as an assembler when she met and married my grandpa. They continued living in Fort Wayne for several years. After his discharge from the Army after World War II and a few more years of city living, my grandpa bought a farm in the country; she lived there for the rest of her life. My mother was in kindergarten when Grandma decided she needed to learn how to drive; she had to give up driving in her later years because cataracts took some of her vision. She played the piano and organ in her church – she was self-taught and quietly insisted that all her children and grandchildren learn to play music in some way. In my lifetime, one of my aunts always lived next door to Grandma on one side, and one of my uncles on the other. There was always a son, daughter or grandchild around to look out for whatever Grandma needed. She lived a very insular and hard-working life between farm, home, school and church.

 

Grandma never had the internet or email. In her later years she wrote letters to anyone she needed to communicate with, and she would answer her phone to talk to people but made few calls herself. She did watch the evening news most days and listened to the radio a lot. It is probably likely that she listened to a significant amount of talk radio. When I met my future husband at college and told Grandma he was a political science major, she said getting involved with a politician was a mistake. She didn’t trust a lot of people anyway, but politicians less so. She was glad that my husband ended up working in IT instead of politics.

 

I don’t know if she even voted when she was alive, but if she had the chance in 2024, I honestly can’t say I can guess who she would have voted for. Her youngest son is an attorney with an adopted biracial daughter – which on the surface might seem like a vote for Kamala Harris. But that son is also a bigot with a public speaking platform who is openly anti-LGBTQIA and supportive of at least the first tr*mp administration. Grandma herself could not be kept from making racist comments about some of our friends – and even her granddaughter – when we were young. At least she did not make the comments in those friends’ presence, but we heard them. Would she approve of dismantling the education department? Of removing the safeguards for worldwide public health? Of the closure of social security administration offices? Of the exposure of our national military security to random journalists and Russian bots?

 

If Grandma were still around to talk to, would I tell her about the Tesla Takedown going on around the nation today? Would she understand the need for peaceful protest in the wake of this unelected billionaire using the failed-businessman-turned-criminal he has purchased to systematically remove the railings that are meant to protect racial, ethnic and religious minorities, the elderly, the sick, the poor, the oppressed? Would she see that the hard-won gains by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movements throughout the nation were necessary and good? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. It would be nice if I could think that she would agree with me.