“Worse luck, I am only human; ostentatious grieving is our touchstone.”
-Catherine Raven, Fox & I
There is a picture hanging in our family cabin in Vermont that I adore. It’s of my grandmother, Heather Joy Robinson—nicknamed “Oma”—on her wedding day. It’s faded and linear. I’m not actually sure if it qualifies as a picture or a drawing, and I never asked. But it is evocative of the ideal of Oma. A soft kind of power and class radiates from it which encompasses the great vastness of her life and her role in the lives of those around her. As she faded from the world, and took her final breaths this Saturday, it was the image I kept in my mind.
Death, especially a progressive death, has a way of tainting the memories we have of a person. It softens and lightens the sharpness and the darkness that comes with the complicated nature of being alive, and it overshadows and obscures the light and the brilliance of an individual’s contributions to the world. Some of this is because of its finality, and some because of the associated symptoms which arrive as death draws near. We resist these as best we can, while also having to accept them. The last time I saw Oma would be in a hospice bed in her Middlebury, Vermont apartment—barely conscious and barely breathing. I had promised her when I saw her in the hospital the week prior that I would be back, and whether or not she was lucid enough then to remember that promise, it was one I was determined to keep. I would not have lied to her, and I cannot think of not having the chance to say goodbye.
In a way, that my family was able to say their farewells is indicative of the kind of person Oma was. She was in many ways the foundation of the families Robinson and Corriss—a beacon for the links we were forging and the lives we were to lead. She ran the household of my mother and her siblings during their time in Kuala Lumpur, she was the face of the holiday dinners of Thanksgiving and Christmas, she was the guard of our decorum and the organizer of games. Through Oma came lessons in penmanship and travel, cooking and baking, how to act and how to read. While her presence was never overstated, it was impossible to miss. How its absence hangs over the family now is a testament to her value in life and in death.
These were not always easy lessons. As happens when multiple generations of families gather and mingle, Oma often found herself perplexed by the world emerging around her. But, then, aren’t we all as perplexed these days? That she was able to maintain her dignity, her composure and her organizational gifts, was no small feat. My mother, more than I, can tell stories of her disciplinary nature, the constraints offered as being a person of her time, and the skills developed from having to navigate and ever-shifting landscape of the cultures in many countries she lived in and the numerous contacts she maintained. Within her own house, she dealt with the rebellion of her youngest son and the constant drama of two twin girls. In time, she would deal with outliving all but one of her children. Graceful, in spite of her world, is perhaps too weak a word for her.
There is much I never knew and will now never know about Oma. She had a reserved nature which at times came across as unapproachable and at other times simply difficult to understand. Her life appeared so like that of Levin’s impression of the Scherbatsky’s: wrapped in a poetical veil that obscured defects and presumed the existence of any. In that sense, her aura was absolute and her history complete. A great portion of her existence was intimately linked with acts of giving—food, and shelter, and hospitality, and organization. When or if she took, it was only in asking for our participation in these things. A younger self would have been unaware that here were the foundations of building and understanding family. An older self, as is so often the case, wishes for more time to have appreciated it.
What I can appreciate are the lessons which have settled in from my time with Oma. As mentioned, she was the host of the holidays and the organizers of family dinners—a role she maintained until I myself took it over. I will remember the anxiety of my first time hosting Thanksgiving at the Corriss household, of being in the role Oma herself usually took while she was there as guest. She was a frequent purveyor of sweets, and while I make chocolate chip cookies where she made sugar cookies, and while the recipes for things such as polar bears and snickerdoodles require rediscovering, from her does stem a love of baking and cooking. Food was in her eyes love and duty, and I can think of no greater sentiment from Oma than these three things perpetually combined.
From Oma came an appreciation of classical music, the power of a concert—I remember “The Great Gate of Kiev” being a favorite. Her collection of art, her friendship with the printer Sabra Field, long inspired my own. Oma was tea, earl grey, and the wisdom of a good book by a fire or window. She loved puzzles, sudoku, and knitting. Her skills were there even in small forms, a mind able to sort and organize and plan. The will to achieve those plans and the grace to handle their upset. Such things are not always pretty, but they are important, and they can be great. She was, in the positions of our families, great. But to be merely that would undersell her, and does those who remain little in their loss and grief.
Oma was creation and order. She was culture and depth. She was class, kindness, discipline, and hospitality. For many years, she was the sun of our family—the light around which we rotated, and danced, and laughed, and cried, and flew. She should not have had to bury children. She should not have had to suffer the loss of so many of her faculties. In a more selfish sentiment, one would wish that she should not have died. But in this, as anything, I think she should have wanted to do her duty. Here, as in life, she succeeded. Oma attained what many wish for: a death where those who loved her and were able to bid farewell. Proper, if one wanted to use the word. She, I think, would have.
Gentle into that good night? No. But prepared, with bags packed and house cleaned and mind and spirit ready to experience another vast, new frontier? Without question. In fitting with that sentiment, my mother tells that she left when a train passed by on the tracks beyond the field outside her window. For a world traveler such as herself, I would expect nothing less from Oma. Would that she could return and, as many times as I remember, share those experiences with us. In time, she will, with tea, and cookies, and a game of bridge.