My Grandma Was Hip, and Hers Weren't Broken

Most people our age had grandmothers who looked and acted like one would expect a grandmother to act (i.e., grandmotherly).

Not mine. She didn't look or act like one, and I loved her dearly for it.

My grandma was born in Duluth, GA in 1925 (Gwinnett Place Mall now sits on the property, and no, no one in our family made money off of that as far as I know), but grew up in Miami. An early marriage ended when the young man was killed in WWII, a second marriage ended in divorce, and my grandpa was her third. Her full name - Geneva Alice Martin Gitannis Benefield Zeigler - sounds like a soap character, which was sort of fitting.

My memories of Grandma Jenny are as vivid as she was. Her vast collection of wigs was legendary in our family; she was a natural brunette (I think), but she favored red wigs that appeared as though they came from the Lucille Ball collection, and we never knew which one she would show up wearing. Sometimes she would surprise us and appear as a blonde, but not often.

Like most of our female Martin descendants, Grandma Jenny spent untold hours in the mirror getting her makeup just right or putting together the perfect outfit. In her younger years, her style was fashion-forward and cutting edge - old photos reveal pedal pushers and mules as early as the late 50s, and even the somewhat dreary June Cleaver-esqe dresses came alive when she wore them. In the 60s she sported the perfect beehive hairdo (or wig, probably), and she became a redhead when it was somewhat scandalous to do so. By the time I came along, she, like many women, had fallen victim to 70s polyester, but even so, I never saw her leave the house without looking her best.

When my mother was little during the late 50s, Grandma decided it was time to find a job, so she did. Evidently this was some sort of affront to my grandpa (and most men at the time, I assume), so she simply didn't tell him. She left after he did and got home before he did, he was none the wiser, and she had extra spending money. Until my mother spilled the beans, which apparently prompted a Fred Flinstone no-wife-of-mine-is-going-to-work tirade. In a then-brazen display of feminism (which she would pass down to my sister, but it somehow skipped our mother), she declared that she was keeping her job, and that was that, and if he didn't like it he could take a flying leap into the nearest canal. He ranted and raved for a while, and eventually got over it.

My grandfather died suddenly in January 1980, a few months shy of my 8th birthday. I remember the day vividly - he got sick, Mom rushed him to the hospital, Grandma ran out of the house after a mysterious phone call, and when they returned it was all over. His death affected my grandmother in characteristic fashion - she mourned, but like the steel magnolia that she was, she dusted herself off and moved on. She even began dating a little, but unfortunately her judgement became cloudy when it came to men.

She met a man - I don't even remember his name - from Nashville, and they started seeing one another. It didn't take long for her to figure out that this gentlemen was no gentleman at all; his shady dealings were obvious, and she soon found herself trapped somehow. He became abusive, even; some of what he did to her remains unprintable.

We're not sure what led her to board a bus to Nashville one summer day, or what her plans were. I'd like to think that she intended to end things with him once and for all, but we'll never know. That may have been what she was thinking when, as witnesses would later tell, she was arguing bitterly on a pay phone (this was 1985, after all) at a Waffle House and slammed it down. She may have been thinking this when she stormed angrily out of the restaurant en route to her hotel, which was across the busy four-laned street. And it's probably just as well that we don't know what she was thinking when she stepped off the curb and saw, too late, the car that was coming over the hill in her direction.

My grandmother was taken to Nashville General Hospital, which, as it existed in 1985, resembled something between a crumbling medeval fortress and an insane asylum. In this squalor, my grandmother languished in a coma for five days until the doctors told the family that yes, her brain was swelling, and no, nothing could be done. My grandmother slipped away on July 24, 1985, leaving her family devastated. She was 60 years old.

My 13 year-old mind comprehended only some of what was going on; this was the first family death in which I was old enough to participate in the rituals. Hers was the first dead body I had ever seen, and I was adamant that I would not go near her, but I was involuntarily propelled toward the pretty casket. She looked beautiful; dead, yes, but lovely in her yellow dress and blonde wig. As I looked at my grandmother, who was now as animated as a piece of furniture, an immense sadness came over me. Never again would I see her smile at me, or hear her voice, or eat her food. She was lying there, dead, resplendent in a pretty dress but still dead, and would soon be put in the ground, and that would be that.

The funeral was held on a typically oppresive late July day, which also happened to be my sister's 8th birthday. I'm not sure if anyone even realized that, or if they did, who was in the mood? She was lowered into the ground next to my grandfather, and the ancient black gravediggers began their task.

My mother's siblings had come for the funeral; my mother's youngest brother Rocky arrived from Miami after a lengthy estrangement. When I saw him with his shocking weight loss and bizarre case of shingles, I instinctively knew what was wrong with him, even as a 13 year-old. No one had to tell me, and no one did. He was also developing a racking cough that got worse and worse, and he was hospitalized once he returned to Miami. Two weeks to the day after his mother's death, Uncle Rocky died from AIDS complications. He was 25.

No one told us the real story, and for an already grief-wracked family, this was too much. There was the gay thing, which for a southern family in 1985 was difficult enough, but no one knew anything about AIDS then, and there was fear, terror, and shame about it, to say the least. The cause of his death was a whispered secret that the adults guarded with their lives, because what would people think? I was belwildered.

After everyone went back to Miami for the second time, my mother and her surviving siblings, like so many, had a falling out, and did not speak for years. I imagine their pain was as terrible as my mother's was, but I only saw her, and she was pain, a raw, walking ball of it. I can't imagine the pain they went through, losing a mother and a brother in short order. It's unfathomable to me that that much pain exists, and I hope I never experience it. My mother had lost her father 5 years earlier, and now this, and she was 30 years old. While she went about the business of raising us - I imagine it was the main thing that kept her going - she was different. And she's never, ever been the same. Life dealt her a blow (and would again 10 years later when her marriage to my father ended), and I imagine that the horrible, searing pain gathered itself into a ball and took its final place in her soul, and it would never go away.

As for me, the loss of my grandmother and uncle remains one of the great tragedies of my life. I live in Tennessee now, and I have visited the accident site and the hospital where she died - by that time, it had relocated, and the building was condemned and was later mercifully torn down. Not only did I lose my grandmother and my uncle that summer, but I lost a part of my mother as well. It wasn't her fault, and she was still a good mother, but my sister and I would never get that part of her back, because it was gone forever. I don't know if it died with her mother and brother, or if it evaporated into the ether, but either way, it ceased to exist.