Saying Goodbye to Grandma Myrtle

My Grandma Myrtle passed away on May 21st. She was 97 years old.

One of my earliest memories is of begging Grandma not to get old. I was three years old and remember it vividly. I was playing with a ball in Grandma’s yard. The ball rolled down the hill and to the road. Grandma and I walked to the end of the driveway together. She retrieved the ball and we started back up the hill. The hill of her driveway is no more than a gentle slope, but back then, it felt like Everest. I stopped midway and asked her to carry me. As she lifted me, she said “one day, I’ll be too old to carry you.”

I burst into tears.

I begged her not to get old. She sat down on a bench with me and calmed me down, but at three years old, I couldn’t fathom the idea of Grandma getting old. I was just starting to understand the concept of getting older then, and equated “old” with “death.” I couldn’t comprehend a world in which Grandma didn’t exist.

36 years later, I am so grateful Grandma got old.

Grandma was born in 1928. She married my Papa Jim, raised five kids, four boys and a girl. Papa Jim died in 1992, leaving her a widow far sooner than she expected. She worked at State Farm, and retired from there. She spent her retirement as an active member of several senior citizen groups. She went on a lot of bus trips, usually with her sisters, and played music at jam sessions, her brother Dewey often with her on his guitar or banjo. She was a gifted pianist, could play anything she heard, but couldn’t read a note of music. When I was younger, I liked to turn on the radio and ask her “Can you play this?” Kenny Chesney, Brittany Spears, Alan Jackson, she could play them all. She preferred bluegrass, old country songs, and hymns.

I had the good fortune of spending a lot of time with her. Her house was the gathering place after church on Sundays. She always had fried chicken waiting. She would get up early, fry it up in her cast iron, and serve it for lunch. I don’t like to pull chicken from the bone – neither does my dad – so she always made tenders or boneless breasts for us. My cousins and I would play outside and a few hours later, we would sit down to an absolute feast prepared largely by her.

I spent a lot of weekends with her, too. I loved being at her house. There were minimal rules. She let me have fries for breakfast, always gave me coffee first in a little plastic clown mug, later in a “big girl” mug. I tagged along with her and my great grandmother, Mama Goolsby, on Saturday mornings to the grocery store, and on Saturday nights, we watched the Movie of the Week on ABC. We played along to an awful lot of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy too.

As I got older, I still spent time with her. She let all of us use her Chevrolet Celebrity when we learned to drive, and at some point, I went from passenger to driver on our excursions. I liked to stop by her house in the summer just in time to watch her “story” with her, Days of Our Lives. Our big family Sunday Suppers trailed off over the years as life took folks in different directions, me included, but during the years I lived in Charlottesville, I drove out to have dinner with her most Sundays, and offered to take her shopping a few times a year. The woman could do serious damage in a Belk.

Grandma always had candy on the coffee table and end tables. Good candy, too. She kept everyone’s favorites. Reese Cups and mini Snickers, orange slices and Twix. You never left her house hungry and you rarely left it empty-handed. She would send home leftovers or packages of candy, or even a piece of clothing she found that she thought you might like. Her vast wardrobe provided several items for my sorority functions. She seemed to always have something that fit the theme.

Grandma was an excellent cook and a storied baker. Her cakes were legendary, especially her pineapple upside down cake. She made each of us our favorite cakes on or around our birthdays. Mine was a strawberry shortcake. She would make a layer cake and make her own whipped cream, too. She always saved a few strawberries for me and left them in the fridge with a dusting of sugar. She’d slip them to me to munch on before dinner. She always remembered to have cucumbers with vinegar for me, canned cranberry sauce for my cousin Brittney. I used to hover around the stove when she cooked, right at her elbow. She would pop me in the forehead with said elbow because I was so close and little came between Grandma and her stovetop.

She didn’t follow a recipe. Several of us asked for her recipes over the years and either didn’t get them or got partial recipes. She once sent me her peach cobbler recipe jotted down on a torn piece of notebook paper. It was included in a birthday card in which she wrote “roses are red, violets are blue, I’m a poet, didn’t you know it?” The recipe said things like a vague “peaches” and “some sugar.” No measurements to be had. I framed it to hang in the kitchen. It took some trial and error, but I figured the recipe out eventually. I’m pretty close on her poundcake and her pineapple upside down cake, too.

A fun fact about Grandma? She could bake any cake you asked her to, but she couldn’t bake cookies. She burned them every time.

Grandma believed in dressing well. She was not to be seen in public in anything less than her best. She liked bright colors, rhinestones. She loved shoes, jewelry, and the color purple. For years, she had her hair “set” every Tuesday morning at 10AM and before that, on Saturdays before grocery shopping. She was sassy, not afraid to tell you what she thought, and had a strong faith. She loved to play the piano at church, and played a number of funerals, too. She played “Amazing Grace” at my mom’s funeral, and at my Papa Clark’s funeral, I had to go over and ask her to “play more somber” as she was rocking out to her hymns while the rest of us mourned. She once told me on the way home from Homecoming at her church that she hated playing “for those old people” because they “sang too slow” and dragged her playing down.

She was the oldest one in the congregation at the time.

Grandma called each of us on our birthdays. She often played “Happy Birthday” on the piano. When she called me, she played “Happy Birthday” and went right into “Rocky Top.” I recorded those calls the last few years because I knew I didn’t have many left. I’m so glad I did. She wasn’t able to call me this year, but last April, she called before 8AM. She played for me, then lit into a lot of chatter about “you’re pretty, you’re smart.” I soaked it in, commented that I needed her to call me before 8AM every morning if she was going to talk me up like that. She ended her monologue with “and I just feel like you’re going to marry someone decent and a little bit famous.”

Grandma always was a little prophetic. I hope that was one of her infamous insights. She said it every time she talked to me after that, even the last time we spoke ten days before she passed. Now that she’s up there, I hope she can pull a few strings to send him my way. I’ve given her a short list of “decent and a little bit famous” men to consider. 😉

Her friends called her “Myrtle the Turtle,” I assume because it rhymed, although I never asked. She had numerous turtle figurines to mark the moniker. She and I were eating dinner one Sunday when I reached for something on the table. She caught me by the wrist and asked “what’s that?” The “that” was the small heart tattoo on my left wrist. I’d had it for a while by that point and I wasn’t trying to hide it, but she did not like it. I told her I was going to get a turtle tattoo in her honor when something happened to her. She told me she’d haunt me if I did and in turn, I told her I’d love to see her. She looked at me for a moment, then burst out laughing.

I never told her about my second tattoo. I figured once was

When COVID hit, my dad called me and asked me to “talk some sense into your grandma” regarding the need to stay at home given her age. I called her, tried to rason with her, and she proceeded to list all the major world events she’d lived through that “ain’t killed me yet.” By the end of it, I called my dad back and had to break the news that I was Team Grandma. She had a point, after all.

I was curious about the history she witnessed from her birth in 1928 until her death. I did some research and my mind is still trying to process all that she witnessed. Here is a partial list.

Amelia Earhart’s first transatlantic flight (1928 – Grandma was two months old)
First appearance of Mickey Mouse (1928)
Invention of bubble gum (1928)
The Great Depression (1929 – 1941)
Debut of Looney Tunes (1930)
Adoption of “The Star Spangled Banner” as the National Anthem (1931)
Completion of the Empire State Building (1931)
Discovery of the neutron (1932)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-legth animated movie is released (1937)
World War II (1939 – 1945)
Founding of McDonald’s (1940)
Completion of Mount Rushmore (1941)
Death of Anne Frank (1945)
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasak (1945)
The Korean War (1950 – 1953)
Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (1952)
First color television (1953)
Sputnik launch (1957)
The Vietnam War (1955 – 1975)
Cassette tape invented (1958)
Assination of John F. Kennedy (1963)
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assisnation (1968)
First manned moon landing (1969)
Watergate (1972 – 1974)
The Challenger breaks apart (1986)
Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989)
Collapse of the Sovient Union (1991)
September 11th Terrorist Attacks (2001)
COVID Pandemic (2020)

That is the smallest of fractions of the history Grandma witnessed. Incredible.

I’ve been thinking back to that early memory of begging her not to get old. I know now how much of a blessing it was for her to grow old, to have almost ten decades on this earth. She lived through a lot of hard things, like the loss of her husband and later, her only daughter. She had an awful lot of fun and played a lot of music, too. She was resilient and full of grace until her last breath.

Her loss has made me think a lot about my own legacy and what I want to leave behind. I can only hope it’s half as full as hers was.

The last time I talked to her, I knew in my gut it would be my last conversation with her. She and I often talked about our shared “knowing” in her later years, a weird we shared of simply thinking a thought and then having it happen soon after. When I hung up that day, I said a little prayer that when Grandma passed, she’d send me a turtle to let me know she was okay. On the evening she passed, I was walking back to my house with my pup Griff and there, on the side of the road in my cul de sac, was a little box turtle. I knew she was gone. My dad called an hour later. I hadn’t shared that story until now. It felt too personal. But in the moment of writing this, it felt right to share.

I’ll get my turtle tattoo in the coming weeks. I don’t think she’ll haunt me, but I wouldn’t mind if she stopped by to say hello. I’d certainly be okay with her pulling a few of those aforementioned strings on that “decent and a little bit famous” husband of mine.

While it is heartbreaking to lose her, she lived a full, beautiful 97 years. And as my dad so perfectly put it when he called to tell me she’d passed, “she remembered them all.”

Cheers to growing old, Grandma. I’m so glad you did.