My Grandmother’s Death

As a psychoanalyst I have learned that the unconscious reveals itself at unexpected times and should not be ignored. Consequently, when I spoke about the death of my grandmother at the Psychohistory Forum session on “The Art, Creativity, and Psychology of Aging,” I wondered why this loss during my college years came to mind. There may have been a special intensity in my recollection since I was asked to write about it. Then I realized I am about to become a grandmother and that has brought back the memories of my own grandmother and how I cared for her just before her death.

The request made me realize that my teenage years were full of loss. First, my dog Tippy died when I was thirteen years old, then my horse Duke had to be “put down” three years later. Next, my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer and died four months later when I was eighteen. Finally, two years later, it was my grandmother. Until now I had never realized that when I went away to college I was trying to escape all this loss. My

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father had also remarried and had another child so I felt that I had lost him as well.

Before my mother Katherine died, she had helped me confirm my plans for college. My grandmother Katie wanted me to stay home and take care of my father and my brothers. But my father insisted that I go to college. Thank goodness he did, since without it my life would have been very different.

It was in my junior year when I was just twenty years old that he summoned me home from the college in New York City. “Your grandmother is ill and we need you to take care of her. Come home right away.”

I left Pratt Institute and returned to Reading, Pennsylvania, where my grandmother lived alone in a semi-attached house. I always loved her home where we had had Saturday night dinner for as long as I could remember. It had lots of dark wood, lace curtains, and stained glass. The house had hardly changed since my grandparents’ marriage over fifty years earlier.

The plan, I found out, was for me to stay with my grandmother until she was better or died—although no one mentioned the fact that she might die. At the time it was considered bad luck to mention death.

My mother had died two years earlier and my father remarried a year or so after her death. He and my stepmother now had a small child to care for, besides my stepmother’s parents who lived nearby. I was the oldest child and my parents’ only daughter so I was the designated caregiver for my grandmother.

In her eighty-third year, my grandmother Katie Althouse had been humorous about growing older. She said things like “The gas company is not sending up gas properly” when something she cooked did not turn out well or that the ingredients were not what they used to be when she accidentally left an ingredient out of a recipe. The newspapers, according to her, were now printing the news smaller, too.

When I arrived, my grandmother seemed thinner. She was weak and appeared disoriented. I had never seen her like this. She had always been a good cook and prepared food for us whenever we visited her. Now she showed no interest in cooking. I asked her what she wanted to eat and I prepared it for her. She had been proud of her cooking, and now ceded all responsibility to me. Since she had a strong personality, she had a way of getting people to do what she wanted without their even minding most of the time.

She had a woman who shopped and cleaned for her, so her home was always tidy: she was by nature a neat person. During the day I sat in her room and at night I slept in a bedroom down the hall. After all these years as best as I can recollect she must have had a bell with which she summoned me or maybe I just peered into her room from time to time to see if she needed anything.

I had always been fond of “Grandma,” a self-sufficient person—one of eleven children who had been farmed out as a child to work for another family. As a young woman, she worked as a servant to a well-to-do family. Then she met my grandfather, married, had one child, my mother, and began her education. She studied cooking and dressmaking. She made her living as a dressmaker while my grandfather worked for the railroad and in construction. Neither one of them had an opportunity to attend college.

Then, one day in church (St. Mark’s Evangelical), as my grandmother told it, the light of God shone on her and she became a faith healer. She would say a prayer for people and write a prayer on a cloth that they would wear. She bought cheesecloth for this purpose. She listened to their complaints much like a therapist. My brothers thought she had truly heard the word of God. Whether or not she heard the word of God, she was able to make a good income from her faith healing. She did not ask for money, but accepted an offering. In this way she bought their home, supported herself and my grandfather and put my mother through college.

As I spent time with her she told me that all was prepared for her funeral. Her clothing was arranged neatly in a drawer—the clothing she was to be buried in. She had a will that divided her assets equally between my two brothers and me, her only grandchildren. The house was to be sold and the money from the sale to be divided between the three of us. She even asked me what I would do with my share. I said, “Buy a red sports car,” but

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of course I never did. She did not flinch or tell me what to do with my inheritance. She showed me her engagement ring, which she gave to me. I do not know what happened to her diamond earrings that she always wore. I think she must have worn them to her grave.

She stayed in bed except when I walked her to the bathroom. She was unsteady on her feet and needed my hand to maintain her balance. Once I took her to have her long hair washed. But that was the only time we went out. At night as I lay in my bed down the hall, I could hear her labored breathing.

I was with her about two weeks. She began to refuse to eat. I hope it did not have to do with my cooking. She would not eat and eventually I heard the death rattle as I sat with her.

I called my father and he called the undertaker. The undertakers came and tried to shoo me out of the room as they wrapped her in a sheet, pulled her along the floor and carried her out as I felt the finality of death.

I think she willed herself to die. The coroner said it was “hardening of the arteries.” Maybe so, but I think after her daughter and her husband had died, she saw herself as not needed—a fifth wheel. That is when she decided not to eat because it would hasten her death. She had always been good at losing weight. She would say, “I just eat less.”

Today, I wonder if she was depressed. She never complained about any of the losses she had suffered. She died when she chose to and with dignity in her own bed in her own home. I know; I was with her. No feeding tubes, no hospital staff, just she and I. She made the decision and I respected her decision as she respected my decision to buy a sports car with my inheritance.

At her funeral everyone said wonderful things about her. Family and acquaintances knew that she had helped the less fortunate, she lived a life beyond reproach, and she treated my stepmother kindly after her own daughter had died.

I was reminded of all this again when my husband and I went to a memorial service for a friend who had recently died. We sang songs and said prayers and after the service shared stories about the woman who had died. It was a good time, remembering the dead while celebrating life. James Joyce told it well in “The Dead.”

After my grandmother’s funeral, my father was the executor of her will. He bought her house and, together with my stepmother, rented it out. The money from the sale was divided equally between my two brothers and me. I kept a lamp of hers and my brothers kept some of my grandfather’s tools. Her work as a healer may even have influenced my own choice of vocations. In various ways her memory is kept alive. Clearly, she lives within me in my strength of character and ability to work hard and save money.

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