Saturday 5 April 2025

 

I found violets in the front lawn when I came back from my walk on Monday. Violets will always put me in mind of my grandma, my dad’s mom, who collected anything with violets on it, from cheap plastic window ornaments to gilded English china and everything in between. In her last months, just after my grandpa’s passing, I can remember her, a pale and grieving shadow of her former self, stumbling through her yard picking violets to bring inside, using a plastic juice cup as a vase. I now have a few of her treasured pieces - a couple of fragile teacups, miniature candlesticks only large enough for a birthday candle, a small china clock with an extremely loud tick that takes a battery size that soon they won’t make anymore. My mom, my sister, my aunt, my girl cousins have the rest. Someday my daughter will have mine; she and my nieces will have the ones my mom and sister keep now. Stuff, yes, but stuff that puts us in mind of her; even though the day is rapidly approaching in which no one will have known her, they’ll just have her stuff.

 

My paternal grandma was born in 1922, into a world in between the wars, the fourth of eight children of a farmer and his wife. Her father’s right leg was paralyzed before 1942, and indeed though multiple sclerosis was discovered in 1868, there was no effective treatment until nearly twenty years after his death. His son, my grandma’s brother Marshall, wrote about returning home from his service in the Navy after World War II to find that his father, having seen him walking up the drive, had struggled to meet him partway down the drive in his wheelchair. To say that grandma’s childhood was difficult would be an understatement. She served in the Navy herself during the war, achieving the rank of Pharmacist’s Mate 3^rd Class and working stateside, mostly in the hospital at the Annapolis Naval Academy. She married my grandpa when she was 24 and had three children. Her father died when she was 49, her mother when she was 72, and her husband less than three months before she died herself, at the age of 77, of “multi-system failure” and congestive heart failure. Though those are the things written on her death certificate, we know she died of Parkinson’s disease and heartbreak.

 

In 1990, when I was in high school, my grandpa and his siblings put together a small booklet about their family’s history. It was mostly about their parents and their growing up years, with a few notes about what they knew of their ancestors further back, and a few notes about their children and grandchildren’s lives at the time. My grandma gave a copy of that booklet to me – not to my parents (at least not to my knowledge), but to me. And she told me, “The oldest granddaughter takes care of the family history.” At the time I didn’t think much about it, but I kept the book. Looking back now, she wasn’t the oldest granddaughter on her father’s side (two of her girl cousins were older), nor was she the oldest granddaughter on her mother’s side…but her cousin Fayne was, and Fayne achieved notoriety among the family for writing a large and exhaustively researched history of the family. I was able to correspond with Fayne for a few years before her death in 2015 and she was terrific. She was probably also a closeted lesbian – and like Grandma, also died of Parkinson’s disease. I doubt that my grandma ever had room in her mind to question whether her cousin – or anyone – might be gay. Later, when I finished school and had time to think about such things, I took up that little yellow booklet, and Fayne’s hardcover book, and I made genealogy a lifelong occupation. So yes, I am the eldest granddaughter, and I take care of the family history – not because my grandma told me to, but because she planted the seed that became an interest that has probably saved me from the crippling depression from which she suffered.

 

I don’t think Grandma ever told anyone she was depressed, and it’s possible she never acknowledged that she was. During her military service, though we don’t know whether there are records, we believe she underwent electroshock treatment, but we don’t and probably can’t know what reason was given for putting her through it. Later, when such drugs were available, she was given tranquilizers and probably took them for many years. “Valium belongs to a class of psychoactive drugs known as benzodiazepines, which are typically used to treat anxiety, insomnia, seizures and muscle spasms. They work by binding to GABA receptors in the brain, which helps to reduce neuron activity and promote relaxation. The first benzodiazepine, chlordiazepoxide, was synthesized in 1955 by the Polish American chemist Leo Sternbach.” (https://www.historyhit.com/mothers-little-helper-the-history-of-valium/) My grandmother probably spent most of her parenting years in this drug-induced “relaxed” state. My father, though he doesn’t talk openly about it, certainly suffered as a child because of the abuse of drugs, alcohol, tobacco and caffeine by his parents, his mother specifically. Grandma and her family believed that “nerves” were an inherited medical condition, and the medical establishment of the time used these tools to treat “nerves”. It is not established that any or all of electroshock treatment, overuse of benzodiazepine, and abuse of alcohol and tobacco are contributing factors to Parkinson’s disease, but I don’t believe that they could have done Grandma any good, either.

 

Grandma and Grandpa both quit smoking when I was born, because my dad would not allow me to visit their house if they still smoked, nor would he let them smoke in his house. He was very determined that I should not have to grow up as he did – and I will be forever grateful that he put his foot down. He now suffers from late-onset asthma and to keep his lungs from filling up with fluid he will have to take daily breathing treatments for the rest of his life. This is because of all the secondhand smoke he breathed in his formative years. My husband, whose parents smoked during all his growing-up years, also suffers from a similar condition.