Grandma Ramsay

My grandmother (your great-grandmother) died last night. Neither of you knew her well and Palmer only met her once. I’ve always thought she was a pretty amazing woman and a very loving grandmother. So I’d like to tell you a little bit about her.

Helen Irene Brittain was born in Iowa in 1918. She had one sister named Zaida (pronounced ZAY-duh) who was a gifted teacher and named state Teacher of the Year. I don’t know that I ever met her sister, but I thought she had a cool name. She also had a brother, Richard that I learned about from my father while fact-checking this story. They both died at relatively young ages of cancer.

She lived through the Great Depression and the dust bowl, which individually were tough times but doubly difficult for her family because they made their living farming.

She married my grandfather when she was 23 (interesting note: I was one year younger than her when I married your daddy). Grandpa was 29. She delivered stillborn twin girls early the following year. She went on to have four more healthy children in ten years’ time, including your papa, her oldest, and papa’s brother, Roger, despite contracting a mild case of polio during that pregnancy.

I never knew her husband, Harold Sidney Ramsay, but I always wished I’d had the opportunity to meet him. No, I more than wished I could have met him. At times it ached that I never knew him. Like many men of his generation, he enlisted in the Army in 1942 (right about the time the twins were born) and spent three years in the Pacific. Grandma Ramsay returned to work as a waitress during his absence. He made his living post-war as a bus driver for Greyhound and moved his family from Omaha, Nebraska, to Kansas City, Missouri, when your papa was in high school. A few years after the move he died of lung cancer, right around his youngest son’s twelfth birthday.

My grandmother went from a stay-at-home mom to a stock room worker at JC Penney to support her two children still living at home. I remember my aunt and uncle talking about how grandma each taught them how to cook one meal, so when she was working during dinner they could fend for themselves. As a child I thought that was very wise. As a parent I think it’s genius.

We always had Christmas morning at her house and she’d cook the Ramsay family’s melt-in-your-mouth ham. One year I got a crimping iron and my cousins and I spent the entire afternoon sitting on the bathroom counter crimping our hair. As we got older the cousins would spend Christmas Day afternoon playing five-card poker. As the youngest child of the family, I never really understood how to play, but I enjoyed simply being included.

Nothing ever changed at her house. She had the same orange, white and green floral sofa, a diner-style kitchen table with the silver edges, a big TV with a wooden frame that resided on the floor, even the same Christmas tree and lights. The only “improvement” that I noticed over the years was the addition of a gold clock that sat on top of her enormous television.

When I was 14 she came to live at our house to recuperate from quadruple bypass surgery. She slept in my bedroom and I moved into the spare room where I got to sleep on my new Futon. I thought that was so cool! She was always home when the school bus dropped me off in the afternoons, so she’d help me with my homework or tease me about my strange snacking habits. For some reason I remember she drank a lot of strawberry Carnation Instant Breakfast drinks while she lived with us.

Shortly after her recovery she moved back to her home and suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side of her body for the remainder of her life. I remember thinking how scary it must have been for her to lie conscious and half paralyzed for hours until she was found. It was obvious she couldn’t receive the care she needed at our house, so she moved into a nursing home to live the last 4-5 years of her life that the doctors estimated.

That was 15 years ago.

At the nursing home she regularly attended church services, a practice she started years earlier at Faubion UMC just around the corner from her split-level house. She also read voraciously and watched the news. When we went to visit her she always talked about current affairs. During these years I developed a hobby for reading, and she and I would mail books to each other after we’d finished reading them. It has always seemed so cruel to me that her mind could be so sharp while her body was failing her.

Last week she suffered a heart attack. She lived two and a half days after she was removed from life support, a feat that baffled her doctors. It didn’t surprise me, though. She has a track record of being tough: living through the greatest financial crisis our country has seen, surviving three years worrying about her husband at war, losing two babies and her young husband, surviving single motherhood, outliving by ten years her doctors’ estimates. It seemed only natural for her strength to shine even during her last hours.

Grandma Ramsay is quite possibly the most resilient person I’ve ever known. She was stronger, physically and emotionally, than I could ever be. I don’t remember ever hearing her complain about her life. Maybe it was because I was a kid.

I have some pretty great memories of her. I think the best memory I have is when she bought me my first Cabbage Patch doll. JC Penney had received a large stock of dolls when they first hit the market. She snuck me into the stock room before they had been put on display so I could pick out a doll myself. It was like a dream come true. There were rows and rows of Cabbage Patch dolls and I got to be the first to choose the perfect one for me.

She was strict about us wearing our seatbelts and locking the door when we rode in the car with her because my brother once fell out of the car at a stoplight while she was driving. She loved taking us to Perkins Restaurant or Furr’s Cafeteria and refused to let my parents pay. She always answered the phone by saying “mmm...yello” and it always sounded like she had just woken up. And she never said “goodbye” at the end of the conversation (your papa does this, too, and it drives me nuts!).

I always thought it was a treat to spend the night with her. I would get to sleep in bed with her and, even though she snored so loud that she would wake herself up, I stayed in that bed. I didn’t want to sleep anywhere else. She had the most incredible black-and-white cut out photo of my grandfather in his Army trench coat and hat sitting on her dresser by her bedroom door. I could study that image for hours.

She would have made a great nurse. She was very intuitive and concerned about even the smallest of our boo-boos.

There are so many more memories I have of her, and as I write this I continue to uncover more in the cobwebs of my mind (like how I used to ride my bike to her house to visit, or when I mowed her lawn once when the grass was knee high, or how I used to wash her car when she came over because I knew she’d pay me). But this will do for now.