The Artificial Grandma

Host Dr. Robert Philipson reflects on the life of his maternal grandmother, Jeanette, tracing a family legacy shaped by mismatched love, unspoken expectations, and the emotional weight of generational silence. From her immigrant roots and ill-fated marriage to her slow decline into senility, Jeanette’s story becomes a lens through which Dr. Philipson explores maternal power, cultural identity, social aspiration, and the personal cost of dreams deferred. With wit, sorrow, and deep insight, he unpacks how the stories we inherit shape who we become.

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.
shogafilms.org/podcasts

Music:

"21 Hungarian Dances, WoO 1: No. 11 in D Minor" – Johannes Brahms / Budapest Symphony Orchestra

"Symphony No. 7" – Ludwig van Beethoven / Bernard Haitink, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

"Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 66" – Frédéric Chopin / Nikita Magaloff

"I'm Always Chasing Rainbows (Instrumental Version)" –Ivy Ravenwood

"I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" – Karrin Allyson

"Old Folks" – John Denver

"I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" – Judy Garland

"Les Vieux" – Karaoké Playback Français

"When You Are In Love" – Mario Lanza

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Transcript

Grandma and Grandpa fell victim to the same tragedy: they married one another. Jeanette thought she was wedding a handsome, devil-may-care Jewish gentleman with money. Handsome? Yes. Moneyed? At that time, yes. But it wasn’t enough. Meyer, protected, sweet and innocent, discovered that the woman he had proposed to was not the one who became his wife. “Never expected to get married,” he wrote for the University of Chicago Magazine in 1916, “but somehow I got inveigled.”

            I’m not sure how Jeanette hooked Meyer, but I understand why, even though she too was deceived by her own desires. My grandfather hadn’t misrepresented himself. He was a simple man, incapable of guile. He was merely living out his father’s aspirations. Harris had immigrated to this country at age twenty in 1863, with few kopecks in his pocket and who knows what his surname was before it was Americanized, but “Goldstein,” if nothing else, marked his ethnicity. Perhaps it took him fourteen years to feel sufficiently established to marry, but when he did, he took a seventeen-year-old landsman, fresh off the boat, to be his bride. Michelle Goldstein (neé Bialosky) obligingly produced seven sons and two daughters while her husband built up a prosperous furniture enterprise.

As my father put it in his later narration of the Goldstein story, “Sam, Izzy, and Abe went into their father’s business and became thieves.” Well-to-do now, Harris wanted his younger boys to have a college education. Meyer was the next Goldstein male, and the patriarch didn’t need more sons in his business. Meyer was no academic prodigy  -- unlike his older sister Anna (another story for a later chapter) -- but in 1908 the University of Chicago was not the elite institution it later became. Meyer played good basketball, and, although only a substitute player, he was part of the Chicago Maroon when the team clinched the Western Conference championship in 1910. His classmates called him “Goldie,” and his years as a college athlete were his salad days. Everybody loved Goldie; he had the popular touch. But the reason he touched people was because, in spite of his good looks and athletic ability, he was a regular guy. His father delighted in him. During his senior year, Inland Steel, headquartered in Chicago, offered Meyer a managerial training position. The company, owned by Jews, kept tabs on college graduates from the Midwest, but Harris told Meyer to turn down the offer. “No boy of mine is going to work for strangers,” he declared. “And, besides, you don’t need the money.” “That,” said my father, “was the first of Meyer’s great mistakes.” Harris tried to make a playboy out of his son – Meyer had a car, good clothes, pocket money – but he was no Tommy Manville. (The reference to the much-married socialite was my father’s. I had to look him up.)

            Jeanette met Meyer in this bon vivant stage. Though Grandpa was not what he seemed, Jeanette always looked to appearances first. Meyer was in Cleveland visiting the Bialosky cousins on his mother’s side. The Cleveland Jewish community was small. One of Meyer’s cousins took him to meet the Freemans who had daughters to marry off, especially Jeanette who was already twenty-five and perilously close to aging out of the marriage market. When my grandmother met this handsome Jewish man from a well-off Chicago family, she put him in her sights. 

            Jeanette had grown up in “straitened circumstances,” as the novels of the day put it. Not all Jewish immigrants achieved financial success. The Freemans were a large family (seven children) in a small town. Shawnee, Ohio claimed two Jewish families, the Freemans and the Schnoebels. “Of course,” my father said, “the Freemans thought they were superior.” As there were no Jewish schools in Shawnee, nuns educated the Freeman girls, and they did a good job of it. Jeanette was cultured; she liked music, the theater, and read all the time. When the girls came of marriageable age, the Freemans moved to Cleveland to find suitable husbands. Jeanette went to work in a department store and garnered some success in interior design. Though my grandmother’s taste was in no way avant-garde, she was good with colors, patterns, and knew how to arrange furniture to best visual effect. She was precise in her speech, possessed an excellent vocabulary, and played a demonic game of Scrabble. Elegant and of small stature, Jeannette only came to Meyer’s shoulder.

            At two generations removed, unable to access their thoughts and emotions, I can only speculate what prompted them to link their lives together. Meyer was a catch, and Jeanette reeled him in. She was pretty, vivacious and stylish. Perhaps she had what passed for sex appeal in 1916.  Living in cities 350 miles apart they couldn’t have spent much time together and went into the marriage on the strength of their separate illusions about one another.  Still, they were so terribly mismatched. How could they not have known they were choosing badly? 

In later years Grandma confided to her daughter that she realized her mistake as soon as the ceremony was over. “Meyer hardly talked after the wedding,” she confessed. They honeymooned at Lake Louise where, I imagine, Grandma pondered her error amidst the magnificence of the Rockies. Jeanette loved to talk, but Meyer was no talker – nor much of a thinker. He hadn’t opened a book since the day he graduated.

He was a nice guy, though. He had no vices, treated his wife courteously, and didn’t try to dominate her.  During the prolonged prosperity of the twenties, the furniture store that Meyer’s father had set him up in provided money enough to mask the incompatibility of their relationship. Meyer was successful, and Jeanette had a maid so that she could pursue her own interests. Three years in Amy was born, the only issue of their union. Mother made it clear when she referred to her status as an only child that Grandma had banished Grandpa from the bedroom once she had fulfilled her womanly obligation to society. When the Depression hit, Meyer lost his furniture business, and the money stopped flowing.  Harris, in his late eighties and long retired, was no longer able to help his son, and Meyer’s brothers were only too happy to bilk their privileged sibling out of his share of whatever fortune was left. They had resented his life of ease, and his marriage to Jeanette had only widened the breach. Jeanette considered the non-collegiate Goldsteins and their wives boorish. She was despised by them in return. Although my mother had many cousins on the Goldstein side, she was only allowed to fraternize with the ones whose fathers were not lying, cheating sons-of-bitches. (Grandpa always seemed a mild man in my presence, but there had been such acrimony in the family that Jeanette dubbed them, “the battling Goldsteins.) Spurned by his brothers, Meyer found a job as a manufacturer’s representative in furniture, and although he fed and clothed his family during the difficult years of the Depression, he would never see the kind of money he’d had starting out. This was a bitter pill for Jeanette.

And here I have to show some retrospective compassion for Jeanette. Amy once shared a poignant memory: her mother on her hands and knees trying to camouflage the worn spots in the design of the living room rug with colored pens. (I couldn’t imagine Grandma vacuuming a room much less on her hands and knees.) She was poor again!  They didn’t have enough money to join Sinai, the posh Hyde Park synagogue. It had to be KAM.  She couldn’t invite members of the temple sisterhood to her home, not with the fraying antimacassars and her sad attempts to cover up the warp and woof of an aging rug.  Before the Depression, going downtown to Marshall Fields was her special excursion. All that merchandise in such a beautiful space filled her with delight. While making one affordable purchase, she could happily contemplate what she might get next time with more household allowance. Meyer had his drawbacks, but at least there was money. And then there wasn’t.

            Meyer’s deficiencies, as Jeanette conceived them, sharpened the loss of her dreams. She wanted to impress people, and Meyer wouldn’t go along with the act.  He didn’t like gossip and wouldn’t comment on her critical assessment of their neighbors and acquaintances. He wasn’t interested in temple society and only went on the High Holidays. Before she became ashamed of her home and stopped entertaining, Meyer would barely acknowledge the ladies who came over for cards. Usually he’d take their daughter and go outside, much to Amy’s relief.  

Amy was another disappointment.  She was too big, too athletic, too unfemininely delighted with her father’s activities: swimming, walks, tennis. Grandma didn’t want her daughter to be a tomboy; she wanted her to be a lady. She wanted her to wear pinafores and Mary Janes. Amy couldn’t be petite, but she could have mitigated her size with the right clothes, by being demur, and less . . .  spirited!

Grandma made Amy feel inept.  My mother often repeated the story about what Jeanette’s friends would say when they met her with her “towering” daughter. “Jeanette, how nice to see you! And this is Amy?!?”

            My mother told me that Jeanette named her Amy after the celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I didn’t give this statement much thought at the time, but it would have been odd that my conflicted Jewish mother had inherited something from a Pentecostal preacher.  When I did think about it, however, I figured that religion had nothing to do with Jeanette’s choice. In Jeanette’s world men, even weak ones, held power. A few exceptional women, and Aimee Semple McPherson was one, did have power. Aimee’s power was broadcast from coast to coast; the content as far as Jeanette was concerned, was immaterial. What she wished for her daughter in bestowing her that name was a kind of masculine agency that Jeanette may have wanted but was certainly beyond her ken. The only power she knew was available through charm, seduction, and an attractive appearance. 

            Subsequent historical research has made this hypothesis less plausible. When my mother was born in 1920, Aimee’s fame was growing, but she didn’t found the giant Angelus Temple and its affiliated radio station, the conduit of her national reputation, until 1923. It’s possible but unlikely that Jeanette knew of her. Still, my mother thought that was where her name came from, so the retrospective feminist gloss I came up with may have applied to her. Nonetheless this speculative exercise opened up a sympathetic evaluation of my grandmother’s character that had been foreclosed by the version of the Goldstein dynamic mediated through my parents: Grandma, the heartless woman who only cared about appearances; Grandpa, the gentle, long-suffering failure who taught his beloved girl how to play; Amy, the dutiful daughter who hated her mother’s values but who absorbed more of them than she wanted to acknowledge.  Alice called this scenario “Grandma-bashing” when the conversation between she and our father and I turned to an assessment of Grandma’s character prompted by a framed photograph we had run across of, as my mother wrote on the back, “the Freeman women.” My sister applied a compassionate corrective to the account.

“Jeanette’s goals were shallow but understandable. She wasn’t an evil person. She had ambition; she wanted a certain kind of life for herself. If she hadn’t married by the time she was in her mid-twenties it was because she wouldn’t settle for less than what she thought she was getting in Meyer. She wanted status, but she ended up with a nice guy. She couldn’t change to adjust to the new reality, and people of her generation didn’t divorce. Her tragedy was that she never recognized that she had a wonderful husband and daughter.”

 “And that was her punishment too,” I added. “People live in the reality that they perceive.”

“Granted,” my father said, “but you know the effect it had on Amy.”

We knew it too well. Mother grew up with the unshakable conviction that she was ugly. No matter how many people told her she was beautiful – and the older she grew the more beautiful she became – she could only think of herself as the ugly girl. (In childish innocence I had launched one of her favorite bon mots when I remarked, “Gee, Mommy, you’re not as ugly as you say you are!”)

So Grandma-bashing came naturally to me, although I had no inkling as a child that I would adopt such an attitude. I loved Grandma and Grandpa as a unit, not distinguishing between them too clearly. I only saw them once or twice a year. They came every Christmas and often in summer for a week or two. I knew them as a present-bearing elderly couple, the only ones in my life of that generation. Grandpa taught me how to shoot baskets in the hoop attached to the back roof of our garage. Grandma played Scrabble, giving me no quarter and forcing me to compete at her level. Grandpa was tall, shambling, and bald. He loved his grandchildren in a physical sense; he enjoyed touching us. Grandma was talkative, well-dressed, neat and contained. She radiated goodwill toward us but was not inclined to kinetic play. She held many opinions about my mother’s housekeeping abilities, taste in clothes, parenting skills. Mother was frequently irritated when Grandma was around; even I could see that. What was tactfully hidden was my father’s feeling about her: contempt.

How she felt about Joe, her son-in-law and the father of her grandchildren, I can only speculate. It certainly didn’t escape her attention that Amy had chosen to marry some version of Meyer. Joe was athletic, loved walking, swimming and tennis. He gave no damn about society or other people’s opinions of him. When Amy hung out with him and his high school gang, Jeanette let it be known that Joe was ill-mannered and careless about his appearance. At that time my father posed no threat.  Amy was a year behind him in school, and he went to the safely distant University of Wisconsin when she was a senior. When Amy enrolled at the University of Chicago (she couldn’t afford to go to a school where she would have to live on-campus), Jeanette dreamed of her daughter dating a string of well-connected bachelors. They had to be Jewish, of course, but the men of Phi Epsilon Pi would be suitable. Jeanette told her daughter that she would be more popular if she let the boys feel her up, a maternal admonition that infuriated her.

When Joe and Amy began dating during the summer vacations there was, perhaps, an element of gleeful spite on Amy’s part. Jeanette’s method of controlling others through nagging and manipulation made no headway. She couldn’t sway Amy with that alone, and Meyer liked Joe. When she had to accept the inevitability of their union she comforted herself with the thought that she could tell her friends that her daughter was marrying the nephew of the famous Rabbi Philipson. In fact, he performed the ceremony!

For the sake of family harmony, Dad tolerated Jeanette and masked his feelings towards her. I never realized how deeply he despised her until after Mother died. He could speak freely then without adding to her guilt.

Shortly after their marriage Joe and Amy moved out to California in 1942. They were ready to leave Chicago. They were tired of the harsh winters, and Amy was not sad to leave her mother behind. As Dad pursued his fellowship in chemistry at the University of Southern California, my grandmother was happy to report to her friends how well Amy was doing on “the Coast.” With the war’s end, my parents started their family. Amy determined that she was not going to raise another only child. There would be a boy and two girls — a girl needed a sister. The boy came on cue, named David as family tradition dictated for a firstborn male. Alice followed, bestowed with the name of a favorite aunt. I screwed things up, as usual. Alice was supposed to have a sister. Meyer was too old fashioned a name to foist upon a baby in 1950, so Meyer became my middle name, an homage to the beloved father. And, with the next try, Alice got her sister, Jean. Close enough to Jeanette. The set was complete. Or so we thought. Dad prospered in the aerospace industry, and we eventually moved to Old House Road.

Grandpa helped with some of this.  He was well-connected in the sales world and arranged for my parents to buy things that were expensive or scarce in the years immediately following the war.  No automobiles had been manufactured in America since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but after the war my family snagged one of the first Plymouths to come off the line in Detroit. Grandpa also got us our first TV set in 1948, and, of course, we bought our couches and bedroom sets at wholesale prices.

The boom years were good ones for Jeanette and Meyer. They had enough money to meet their needs. They lived their parallel lives — never friends, the way my parents were — but well-intentioned roommates who had long ago learned to accommodate themselves to one another. And they enjoyed visiting their daughter’s family on the mesa. Meyer enjoyed it so much that he came out a few times by himself. He loved his grandchildren. Jeannette loved the spacious house, the large back yard, the pool and the lawn chairs, the sunshine and glamor of California, but she was nervous around the children. She avoided being alone with us. Mother eventually caught on to the fact that she’d never be able to ask Grandma to take care of the kids by herself. She had tried that once, and Grandma, unable to say “no” outright, had to work herself into a cold that required her to fly back to Chicago the day Mom and Dad were to go off for a week by themselves.

In the manner of dysfunctional families, the Goldsteins never talked to one another about anything that mattered. There was copious communication, both written and oral, but none of the emotional truths of their lives got aired. My mother wrote a letter to her parents every week for over thirty years, and the whole tone of her correspondence was attuned to Jeanette’s ear. Everything was sprightly, upbeat, chronicling and chit-chat. In my mother’s letters to her mother, our family was the perfect reproduction of the TV fantasies of the Eisenhower years. Both Joe and Amy were concerned that they were raising their children in a neighborhood that was devoid of history, diversity, vitality, and the messiness of the streets they had known in their youth. My brother was so loony that he needed medication, and keeping him in the family, even after a child psychiatrist suggested institutionalization, put a tremendous strain on us all. My mother felt stifled by her command performance as the happy suburban housewife. An accidental pregnancy resulting in the infant death of Joe Jr. followed by a miscarriage on a try to “recoup” the loss sent Mother to the brink of emotional breakdown. Little of this underside got into the chronicles. But it was this underside that sent us to Paris in 1961.

A lifetime of good American stress had given Grandpa good American heart disease. He suffered his first coronary the year I was born. Even though Grandpa was only in his sixties during the time I knew him, I remember him as an old man, one who could not exert himself too greatly nor move too fast. Since I thought all old people were like this I didn’t regard his behavior as handicapped or extraordinary. The second and final heart attack struck him while we were living in Paris. I was eleven years old when death introduced himself to me. Who told me? What was I doing when I heard the news? All I can remember is throwing myself on my bed in our Paris apartment and sobbing hugely. Death, a great irrevocable blackness, had swallowed my grandfather forever. Boosting my grief was the fearful realization that this too would be my end. In my childish egotism I was oblivious to my mother’s sorrow. She had lost not only her father but the first great friend of her life. Now there was only Jeanette to deal with.

For the next twelve years Grandma lived by herself in a Hyde Park high rise near the lake. She led an active life, making forays to the Loop to attend a cultural event or to shop at Marshall Fields. Since these were the years of my adolescence, this period gave me my most vivid sense of my grandmother as a person in her own right. Even that sense was limited.  My parents had constructed, for the sake of the children, a “grandma” who was kind and loving. We had plenty of benign cultural stereotypes to draw on, and Grandma herself was so bland with us that there was little evidence to the contrary. My interactions with her never went beyond the superficial. My father later claimed she wasn’t capable of anything deeper.

Every year Grandma would have one of the children stay at her apartment for four or five nights during spring break. My older brother and sister went several times before my turn came. Then one year I was put on a Chicago-bound flight toting a baked leg of lamb as carry-on luggage. Grandma didn’t cook any more, and Mom wanted to make sure I ate well during my visit. I was excited about the trip. It was the first time I had flown anywhere by myself, but the visit itself was uneventful. Gram’s big excursion for me was the one she reserved for herself, a train ride to the Loop where we lunched at Marshall Fields. During the meal she proudly introduced me to a waitress with whom, over the years, she had struck up a familiarity. Since Gram was afraid to go out at night, we played Scrabble and watched TV. That is my most intimate, vivid memory of my grandmother before her precipitous decline.

In February of 1973  Grandma tumbled down the steps of the Illinois Central Railroad returning from an afternoon at the Art Institute. A minor stroke precipitated her loss of balance. She woke up in the hospital disoriented and with broken ribs. Mother immediately flew to Jeanette and reestablished her in her apartment. But it was too late for that. Gram was no longer physically or emotionally prepared to live alone. Her solution – the decision that precipitated such heartache and drama – was to come to California and live with her daughter. But she couldn’t just ask. That wasn’t the way the Goldsteins communicated. During the following two months, Mother flew to Chicago repeatedly to attend to one emergency or another. On her third trip she bowed to the inevitable and told Jeanette she would have to move to California where she would be nearer.  All seemed to be going as planned.

Grandma was installed in one of the bedrooms. The children were out of the house by that time. Grandma settled in thinking she was there to stay. As she was still recovering from her broken ribs there was no need to unpack her clothes. The reckoning could be put off for a while. 

Amy had never liked her mother but she loved her mother, and out of this helpless love streamed a powerfully corrosive guilt. Had it been up to her, she might have allowed her life to be wrecked by Jeanette’s demanding, chattering, nit-picking presence. Dad wasn’t having it. He told Amy she would have to choose between them. With the burden of guilt lightened somewhat, Mother located a Jewish retirement complex near Beverly Hills where she thought her mother might be happy. Jeanette had determined she could only be happy under her daughter’s roof. She pouted and complained but Dad was immovable. She finally played her trump. “If nobody wants me around, I shouldn’t be around.”

One spring afternoon my parents returned home from errands to find my grandmother passed out on the steps of the shallow end of the swimming pool. Her head rested on the top step and she was breathing normally, but her body had turned cold. My parents took her to her bed and revived her. As a suicide attempt it had been very effective. It was certainly a cry of desperation, but my parents were too alienated to hear it as such and for my grandmother it was much too late to create in them a reserve of love and affection. My parents would have taken in a different Jeanette—one who was more giving and tolerant—but now she was reaping what she had sown. They put Grandma in the retirement home near Beverly Hills, an hour’s drive away.

But Jeanette wasn’t done yet. She made sure Amy came running to her several times a week. She needed a dress, stockings; how could she show up in the dining area without having her hair done? Who would take her shopping? Furthermore the suicide attempt had refractured her ribs, and she was in pain. She needed Amy to be there when she visited the doctor.

After a month, Amy cracked. She brought Grandma nearer but not to Old House Road. Gram was placed in the Mission Villa Convalescent Home in San Gabriel, a drive of only 20 minutes. With this fresh evidence that she could no longer control her reality, Grandma suffered a psychotic break. She was convinced that the facility was holding her against her will (which was true, as psychotic insights can sometimes be), and she ran away. Wandering around disoriented on the street, she wasn’t difficult to locate. When she was taken back to the “Home,” they put her in the hospital side of the facility and tied her to the bed by her midsection. Jeannette who had always prided herself on her elegant appearance, was now reduced to a disheveled, struggling madwoman.

I had the opportunity to see her in this condition because I had graduated from college and had moved back home. My parents had reservations for the High Sierra camps of Yosemite, and the responsibility of looking in on Grandma fell to me. I hadn’t seen her since she had been out last Christmas, before the decline had set in so precipitously, and I wasn’t ready for that wild-eyed Medusa-haired woman tied to the bed that greeted me.

“Joe,” she said. “Joe, I’m so glad you’re here. These doctors are keeping me prisoner.”

“I’m not Joe,” I said. “I’m your grandson Robert.”

Her eyes focused on me somewhat. “Oh, Bob, you’ve got to tell Amy to get me out of here. These doctors, they’re performing experiments on me. They want to kill me. My ribs hurt. They broke my ribs to keep me from running away. Why doesn’t Amy come for me? Doesn’t she know how they’re treating me?”

“Grandma, you’re here because you’re sick. The doctors are trying to make you better.”

“Bobby, please help me,” she pleaded. “If Amy knew what was happening to me, she’d take me away. Where is she? Why isn’t she here?”

“She and Dad are hiking in Yosemite.”

“Then you have to take me home. Untie these straps underneath the bed. I don’t know what they did with my shoes and dresses. Come on, Bobby. Come and untie me.”

“I can’t, Grandma.”

I was too shocked to feel anything. When she realized I wasn’t going to help her, she tuned out on me. She was still talking, but she no longer addressed herself to me. And after a time I could no longer follow her ramblings. She was in Shawnee, speaking of her parents and sisters as if they surrounded her. Then she’d flip back to the present – or her version of it. The obsessive thread through all of this was Amy. Amy would save her. Once she found Amy things would be all right.

Grandma never fully recovered. She eventually returned to some version of sanity and moved to the “Home” side of the facility where she spent the final thirteen years of her life. They were years of decline into isolation and senility. Her hearing deteriorated, but she wouldn’t tolerate hearing aids. Mother brought her a hearing trumpet, but she was too vain to use it. Shouting was exhausting and awkward when she was in the common room or brought home for a holiday meal. She tried to guess at what people were saying, but the constriction narrowed until she lost her hearing altogether and we could only communicate through writing. Her mental facilities diminished steadily as well, and by 1980, after she’d been in the “Home” for eight years, she was completely senile. 

All of this was inexpressibly painful for Amy. She had always resented Jeanette’s power over her, but to see her mother so pitifully reduced increased her guilt at abandoning her (as she conceived it) a hundredfold. At the same time Jeanette’s ineffectual fussing about the state of her hair or whether she had a nice dress in her closet could drive Amy into as much of a frenzy of irritation as if Jeanette had been in full possession of her faculties. Each visit to the “Home” for Amy was a Calvary of anger, guilt, helpless love, and an overwhelming fear that she was witnessing her own future. (Amy never understood that she had made herself too well loved to suffer the fate of her mother.) 

It got worse as grandma got older. She wrote to Marion in 1979, “I have no means of communication with this 93-year-old wreck and nothing at all to talk with her about as all she is is herself – inward looking – old  and frightened. Each time I come she repeats and repeats, ‘You are my only one. It is only because of you that I live. YOU are all that keeps me alive – my baby!’ Each time it is a wrench that takes me hours to get over, and if I drank, then I would drink.” 

I too hated the place and considered the name a travesty. The convalescent home was not a place where people convalesced, and it was the furthest thing from home imaginable. As an institution it was antiseptic and tolerable to look at if you didn’t have any personal connection to it. Brightly-colored murals of Venetian gaiety festooned the white corridors, pastel bridges and gondoliers. The common room contained a piano, and the Hispanic staff and attendants who did the dirty work provided some spark and humor. As a warehouse for the elderly it was the last word in acceptable marginalization—and quite expensive. People’s bodies were kept functioning even if their minds and hearts—what remained of them—asphyxiated from a lack of family, love, conversation, books, music, anything that went beyond physical existence. Mother knew well enough what kind of place she’d consigned Grandma to. For a thinking, passionate woman, this was purgatory. Grandma was neither thinking nor passionate for most of her time there but still Mother was riven with guilt. Twice a week she went to see how Grandma was doing, to talk to the staff that bathed and fed her, to make sure the convalescent home knew that Mrs. Goldstein had a vigilant daughter who would kick up a fuss if her care wasn’t up to snuff.

The children also visited Grandma when we were in town, but after 1980, when she was deep into her senility, she was no longer able to tell who was whom much less follow our lives. (Amy, however, she always knew.) Since Grandma’s mind had died, our sessions with her were the equivalent of a visit to the cemetery—only in this graveyard the corpses were still ambulatory. We all wished her dead, but none more fervently—or with greater guilt—than my mother. Yet Jeanette’s rage to live had not diminished one iota. This fury, never connected to her soul or intelligence, insured Grandma’s tenacious grasp on the mechanics of living. Her cardiovascular system would not quit. Health crises there was aplenty, but everything was handled so efficiently that the empty, breathing albatross that had once been my grandmother was always restored to its convalescent bed, tied invisibly around my mother’s neck.

Alice has a theory that this continual burden contributed to the pressure that caused the cells in Amy’s brain to mutate into a spidery, elongated tumor. My mother was diagnosed with brain cancer in the summer of 1985. She died four months after the confirming CAT scan presented us with her death warrant. Jeanette continued to breathe, eat, and rid herself of bodily wastes in her “Home,” oblivious to the agony of her daughter and her daughter’s family. She was so far gone that she never realized Amy had stopped coming to visit. And if anybody had written on the pad of lined yellow paper that Mother made sure was in the nightstand YOUR DAUGHTER IS DEAD, she would have looked at us weakly, quizzically, without understanding. Grinning, shriveled, stripped of memory, personality, and intelligence, Grandma was the happiest member of our family.

My father was devastated by the death of his companion of fifty years. He occasionally looked in on the body that used to be his mother-in-law but made no attempt at communication. Only Mother had hoped there was a person behind the vacant eyes and vaguely troubled smile. Now there was no need of pretense. It was only waiting for Jeanette’s blind life-force to surrender her failing body.  Nobody cared about her anymore.

She died in February of the following year, outliving her daughter by four months. She was 95 years old. Dad had her cremated and brought her ashes to Chicago that April where he was teaching a seminar in polymer chemistry. I came down from the University of Wisconsin where I was in graduate. Dad had determined that he would scatter Jeanette’s ashes in Lake Michigan near the neighborhood where she had spent most of her life. We met for dinner after my father’s seminar and took the IC from the Loop to Hyde Park. The night was black and cold by the time we made our way to Lake Michigan’s shores. Dad led me to a narrow beach of sand and boulders. I could hear the traffic’s noise on the expressway behind us. Both of us had been quiet since we had left 57th Street Station, the site of my grandmother’s literal downfall. With the lights of Chicago shining behind us, obscuring any view of the stars, the lake seemed tremendously vast and black, a heaving expanse of the iciest water imaginable. The earth curved into darkness the way I had imagined death at the end of existence when I had sobbed for Grandpa’s disappearance on my Parisian bed. Lake Michigan’s waters lapped murmurously on the boulders as Father undid the white box containing my grandmother’s earthly remains. The wind blew steadily off the lake, bone chilling. I stuck my bare hands into the pockets of my jacket. Everything was so black from where the wind was blowing. My father’s white hair gleamed dimly in the reflected light of the city, his face a mask of grief.

“Let’s go out to the end of the rocks,” I said. “Otherwise her ashes will blow onto the shore.”

He agreed and we clambered out to the final boulder. Dad finished unsealing the box. We waited for the wind to abate. When the moment seemed right, Dad stretched the box over the water and turned it upside down. Small bits of bone fell directly below, but the ashes were caught up by the wind and borne onto the water behind us.

“Goodbye, Jeanette,” my father said, his voice caught with sorrow for the loss of his wife.

I said nothing. Compared to the memorial service that had commemorated my mother’s passing—the community of family and friends who had delivered such heartfelt, tear-filled tributes—this little moment that was supposed to belong to Jeanette seemed threadbare. Her ashes now floated on the dark waters of the lake, and neither one of us had anything to say. What memorial was there to make to a life that had been lived so narrow-mindedly, so willfully blinkered? Had she loved anybody in her adult years? What circumstances and events had so deformed her heart that she could only recognize her own values and desires? 

I never knew Grandma as a person, and, given the kind of person she was, that was just as well. I grew up with a stereotype, “Grandma,” to be later replaced by an object lesson on the horrors of a prolonged old age. Where was Jeanette in all of this? When she finally passed, my family was reeling under the shock of my mother’s death. There was no thought, no emotion to spare for a woman who had alienated one generation and had never been real for the next. My father’s words were really the kindest one could make upon the shore of a life that had been so picayune and thwarted. As her ashes floated upon the water in that black and windy night, I found I had nothing to say about my grandmother and—even worse—nothing to feel.

Goodbye, Jeannette.