Mary Margaret Miller Cartmell Bearce

Five years ago today my grandmother died. She left like she lived most of her life: gracefully. And she left after bringing my entire family together for a very emotional but fun weekend. I don’t think a day has gone by since she died that I haven’t thought about her. Each of her kids and each of her grandkids wrote a memory of her which was published in a book for each person in my family. While deeply personal, sharing my thoughts on such an amazing person seems like the right thing to do. Now, after you read this, go hug your grandmother.

Soon after she returned from Egypt in the 1970s, Grandma gave me a soapstone cat she bought on her trip. I don’t remember her exact words, but I do clearly remember that she told me that keeping the cat next to my bed would always keep me safe and protect me. Since that time, the cat has always been on my nightstand next to my bed. Every time I looked at the cat – pretty much every morning – I always thought of Grandma and how much she loved me.

My name was always trapped in her mind somewhere between her son Steve, her male grandchildren Paul, Travis and Michael, a few pets from various families, and the occasional friend, so she just settled on “boy.” I can remember her bellowing “boy, where are you?” in the middle of a grocery store when she would give Alyssa and I freedom to wander the aisles. I didn’t really like being called “boy” because she always seemed to manage to get Alyssa’s name right. But looking back, it makes me laugh because she would try to get to “Brett” but it always came after a machine-gun style spluttering of other names, “Steve-Trav-Al-Osca-BOY!”

She wasn’t your typical Grandma generalized and stereotyped in Currier and Ives. My Grandma didn’t bake apple pies and wander around in an apron. She invested money and bought real estate. She traveled to exotic places to visit her children and grandchildren. She read voraciously and appreciated the things she learned. But in one way she definitely was a stereotypical grandma – she loved and cherished her grandchildren. For me, it was taking me to look at model homes and at the same time trying to make me understand how a house was purchased. It was setting us up for the future by investing money for us and trying to teach us the value of interest earned and, with enough focus, the ease of playing the stock market. It was teaching me how to balance a checkbook and the importance of managing your money. It was making a risky investment on a computer for me so that I could start and run my own business as a teenager and continue to learn and grow with technology. And for all of us, it was the articles torn and clipped out of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters about the most random topics. Grandma’s clips made us all laugh, but the passion behind them and the desire to share the knowledge enclosed in the articles shows how much she cared about each of us.

Grandma made me appreciate the art of letter writing and always encouraged me to write. When I moved to Washington, D.C. for many years she and I would correspond through letters and then, in a shocking move for anyone her age, through email. I think while she felt a sense of accomplishment “using the computer” to send email, she always appreciated a letter more. And nothing was better than sitting down and telling her things that were happening in Washington. I think she was convinced I knew all the answers to all the crazy government conspiracies beaten to death in the midnight radio shows she listened to.

She won’t ever know how much she meant to me because I could never quite find the right words. She always told me how gorgeous my writing was, but when it came time to capture the depth and intensity of the feelings for her (and for the rest of my family), my words fail me. Grandma was so many things to me – a mentor, a friend, an irritant (she had a knack for getting under anybody’s skin with one sharp comment), a motivator, a risk-taker, a uniter – but most of all, she was my Grandma. And I love her.

One afternoon Grandma and I were looking through old photos and we came across this old black and white photo of two young women standing in the wind. They were both dressed to the nines, smiling devilishly, and one of them was holding a cigarette. Grandma moved to throw it away, but I grabbed it and asked about it. She told me, after some prodding, that it was a photo of her and her sister. And she finally, after much more prodding, told me the woman with the cigarette was her. To this day, it is my favorite picture of grandma because it captures a part of her I never knew, but simultaneously captures the personality of the women I always knew.

Ultimately, the greatest thing about Grandma was her ability to draw the family together. No matter what, it seemed, the family would come together for Grandma. And we did it once again for her. I always remember December 1 through December 4, 2005 because she did it one last time. She brought our family together to laugh, cry, reminisce, re-discover, and just plain realize what an amazing family our matriarch, our grandma, helped to create. She loved nothing more than to see her family together. And it was the last thing she did on Earth. What a perfect legacy.

So now, I find myself looking at that soapstone cat every morning and my heart is heavier because I know that I can never tell Grandma how beautiful she looks, or roll my eyes at her ongoing commentary of the impending depression, or go see model homes with her, or even zip off a quick letter to make her smile. But I do know that moments after my heart drops a little in that glance, I smile because I have something to always remind me of Grandma. And it will always be next to my bed. And it will always protect me.