Repairing Memory: A Tribute to Mom-Mom, Dorothy M. Drury
I’ve felt a bit of guilt for not sharing anything about this or making a statement sooner, but it falls in line with a normal part of life for me: delaying something when it seems to warrant more time, thought, energy, and heart than I can presently muster. The loss of a loved one certainly warrants a lot more effort than my typical social posting, and the cumulative exhaustion and angst that has been growing in me through my unique circumstances over the past year has rationed the amount of effort I have to put forth down to nearly nothing.
But here I am, typing, hoping to have something worthwhile to say and share by the day after Mother’s Day (edit - 2 days late). Dorothy Drury, my maternal grandmother, “Mom-Mom,” died at age 90, on April 5. It’s been over a month, but in this purgatory most New Yorkers call their daily existence, time seems stagnant and challenges are faced with a stoicism from which the vapors of emotions often take ages to emerge. For myself, it’s at least given me the time and mental space for those thoughts and reactions to ferment, bringing out far more color and perspective than was there on that drab Sunday morning on 40th street when I got the call.
Mom-Mom had passed peacefully, from what we could tell. A floor nurse from her care facility at Willow Valley found her expired when stopping by for a routine check-in, just a few hours after her last one. My mom told me this in a measured way, voice only wavering once; it was an expected eventuality, so the hit wasn’t as hard as it might have been. But my first thought, still adjusting to the new normal of shutdown life under COVID-19, was her isolation. While the conversations relayed to me since her facility had closed its doors to any kind of visitors sounded positive, I couldn’t help but feel the hurt of knowing she hadn’t had a visit from her 4 children in several weeks, who had until then been faithfully taking turns coming by every day or two. What were those final weeks, days, hours like for her?
For us, the unprecedented public restrictions on life presented their own challenges in response. My family was “lucky” in a sense that Mom-Mom had been forced to let go of her apartment in the community after so many months in the skilled care unit; most of her things were in storage offsite. But there were logistical hurdles that no one had any reason to consider prior to that, the most obvious one being how to lay her remains to rest and say our farewells. What would happen hinged largely on me, the only non-local. I wavered back and forth a few days on what I should do. This was going on just as concern over the virus was peaking. There were no trains running the routes that would get me home, my motorcycle was still wintering in a Pennsylvania barn, and Greyhound was only running one bus to Harrisburg a day (and traveling by that ordinarily unnerving conveyance was made untenable by filling it with the exhalations of 40-some potentially infected strangers). Aside from getting home, the question remained of what to do with me - New Yorkers were being urged to self-quarantine for 14 days if traveling elsewhere.
I decided to make the journey. My dad drove out, tossed me an N95 he had from his “essential” retirement job (and a package of toilet paper because the man is as hilarious as he is helpful), and we headed home, my first time back since Christmas day .
I resided in the plush digs of a loaned camper in my parents’ driveway, and we shared our three daily meals at separate tables on opposite sides of the garage, me never setting foot inside the house over the six-day stay. We had our graveside service at Manor Church in Lancaster County, where my aunt attended and had purchased plots in their memorial garden. Attendance was 9 plus the minister. All were wearing masks and standing at a distance. My sister joked that I should observe from a nearby hilltop like “in the movies,” but I kept it to about 10 feet. The service was brief. Olive Garden brought us meals, which we shared at 6 separate tables in an annex, wiping the place down with disinfectant when we left. There were no embraces, few tears, and a general unease - it all just felt too alien to act in any “normal” way. Still, I was glad we could all be there.
The somewhat cold, stilted, sterile conclusion was fitting, in a certain sense, as it felt to me like I had been losing a little bit of her piece by piece over the past 14 years. She lost her husband, my Pop-Pop, in 2005, and a very visible part of her left with him. There was an energy to her that I never saw return fully after that. Her old-person injuries started to stack up and her health very gradually, but steadily declined. When you have to devote so much of your energy to simply existing, there’s not much left to be you. A few weeks after moving to Manhattan, I went home for her birthday. My mom was sick and couldn’t attend, but the rest of us went and moved her from her skilled care unit to her apartment for a celebratory dinner. Every breath was labored, punctuated by CHF-induced coughing spells. Every shift in posture made her wince in pain. Every chime of the clock demanded a moment to close her eyes. Watching her from across the room, enjoying some of her favorite food, my soul ached. I just wanted it to end, for her pain to be over.
That, of course, is not what happened. A child of immigrants and raised during the Depression, all she knew how to do was keep going. She even made some small improvements, seeming happier on my next two visits and even when I called her on the following birthday. But she only made it a few weeks past that final call. After 90 years of pushing forward, I can’t imagine how tired she was. She closed her eyes, and that’s how she stayed.
If you were wondering if this would get a little less awful, you’ve reached that part. When you experience someone’s gradual decline, day by day, beside them - especially when that period spans almost the entirety of your adult life, you begin to know them only for what they lack, seeing the empty spaces in their fading presence, like bare spots where flecks of paint have chipped away from the once-vibrant mural of their life, weathered by time and the elements. But closing the book on a life well-lived always brings the full painting back into focus. There was a moment during the afternoon of Mom-Mom’s internment when I was able to relearn this vibrant woman through the memories of others. During the meal, over pasta in plastic takeout bowls, my mom pulled out a stack of correspondence sent to my Mom-mom on her 90th, part of a card shower solicited to her friends near and far. What emerged letter by letter were memories frozen in time, untouched by injury and cellular degeneration. She had been of course kind, but kind in a way that made people seek her company. She was also wise, wise in a way that brought people to her in search of advice. She was strong, strong in a way that people knew they could always lean on her. She was tireless, tireless in a way that made her indispensable to her collaborators through any project or challenge. And she could be playful, playful in a way that brought about smiles to save for later. She was loyal - a true partner to her husband of over 50 years, an advocate for her children, and a carer of her two grandchildren. She was faithful, always, to God, a model of earnest devotion that reminded me of what personal faith once looked like for myself. Suddenly I could see the grandmother of my childhood, in all her color and complexity.
The people who wrote those letters likely weren’t thinking they would be anything other than a warming sentiment to their recipient, but they served an important role to us in that moment of closure, and in rejuvenating and preserving my faded memory. Once life is back to normal, the family will have the chance to sift through a lifetime of belongings, holding on to things like journals, photo albums, and keepsakes, but I find myself wishing I had played a more active role in carrying record of her life forward. Her husband, my Pop-Pop, died just before Christmas when I was 19. As a child, he was my source of stories (a few made-up ones I conflated with truth), and I recall a drive to Philadelphia for a Phillies game where I asked him everything I could think of. The specifics are faint, but I remember the tales of his many childhood jobs (and getting robbed during the course of them) on the streets of New York City. The basics of his time in the Army during the waning years of WWII, meeting his wife, and his early years in urban ministry after his religious awakening. While many of those stories remain in my memory in rough form, what I would give to have recorded that car ride in its entirety. I created a bio page for him in a website-development class I took in high school, and later memorialized him in a Xanga post without realizing that someday those servers would cease to exist, and my content with them. With that in mind, I had hoped to have some long conversations with Mom-Mom using an oral history app like StoryCorp to document them. Unfortunately, even as I knew her time was getting shorter, my life was getting complicated, and I never found the chance. In light of that, I’m even more appreciative of what was in those birthday cards.
If there’s something universal I can take from this and impart on you, it’s to resist the effects of the decay of time on your memories of those who are important to you. It’s so easy to be caught in the perspective of now, to lose perspective of our evolving selves and the various identities we grow and shed as we age and adjust to circumstances. Taking time to remind yourself of the full spectrum of existence, both for yourself and others, and recording what you might have trouble holding on to, will undoubtedly lead to a fuller sense of life lived when you’re old and looking back on it.
On my TV stand sits a candy dish in the shape of a nesting chicken. It’s a piece from the 60’s, made by the Indiana Glass Company. It had a permanent place on the end table at my grandparents’ home outside of Lancaster, where it became a bit of a friend to me on my visits as a child, when the grown-ups were busy with other things. It’s devoid of old-lady candy now, but I’d like to imagine it carries my memories of her in that home; from the earliest (getting a bath in the kitchen sink), to the Thanksgiving feasts with her mandatory family photos, Christmas swaps and the later more grown-up utilitarian Christmas gifts I find myself using all the time, trips to the ugly yellow house in OCNJ and the endless games of Rook, Pinochle, Mille Bornes, and Dutch Blitz at the table wherever we were. I’ll miss her dearly, but if I continue to look closely and keep those memories closer, I’m sure I will continue to see her in my family members and myself as long as we’re here.
Obituary without LNP's Paywall (and an article from Columbia Journalism on LNP’s pioneering obit. paywall)
http://stewardingself.com/ - Her tribute page
Photo Collection - Including some with yours truly
