Grandmother Frances, Finally
By: Mary F. Dansak
Tags: Grandparents, Love, Loss, Death, Family

My grandmother Frances had a chiseled chin and huge, haunting eyes. Maybe her eyes are just huge, but because she has always been a specter in my life I feel them haunting me.

I’ve always known of her, that she died when my dad was only four years old and that her sisters raised my father until his own father, my Granddaddy Logan, got remarried. But she was not My Grandmother. The grandmother that I knew was my Mama Ann, and she was the kindest and gentlest grandmother ever. She dressed in the colors of a newborn fawn, and her divinity has never been matched. I loved her very much and never thought a lot about the other grandmother, the one that died so long before I was born. Frances was relegated to a family story.

Yesterday I picked up the only picture I have of Frances and stared at it until it came to life and I began to cry. What were your dreams, I asked the picture as I pried it out of the dime-store frame to see if there was anything on the back, a date, a clue about where it was taken. I discovered it was cut out of a page in a yearbook, so I assume it was taken when she was in high school. She was only 24 when my father was born, only 28 when she died of complications from a miscarriage.

Daddy said he didn’t remember her much, and his only memory of her death was standing at her gravesite while people tossed dirt into the hole as the casket was lowered into the ground. It reminded him of the opening scene of Dr. Zhivago, he’d say, and tears would well up in his own eyes. Did he get those eyes from his mother, I wonder?

Now that I am a grandmother the world is different in so many ways. Yesterday I was hit with the full understanding that the young woman in this photograph was really my grandmother, not just a family story. I held the photograph in my hands and willed her to know that the little boy she left behind, the four year old Robert would follow his burning dream and become a renowned herpetologist. She would be the grandmother to me and my brother, the great-grandmother to our three daughters, and the great-great-grandmother to Annabelle and Ruby. Ruby, incidentally, is four years old now. The idea that she could lose her mother and the memories of this rich life they have together is wrenching.

You did well, I said to that photograph. Your sisters raised your little boy until his stepmother could take over. She loved Robert and he was happy until the day he died. I want her to know all these things and if I could just get in a time machine and go back and tell her I would go in a New York minute.

I think about my own tender role as “grandmother,” and the stark reality that I will not be alive to see my grandchildren when they are the age I am now, 56, and the tears start up again.

I cry a lot these days. Maybe it’s the pandemic and the fact that I have not hugged my mother or even seen her except through a window in nine months and likely won’t for six more. My Mother! Maybe it’s the emotional battering I feel from hearing people up in arms over wearing masks while also hearing about parents and other loved ones dying.

My tears today for my Grandmother Frances? Maybe it’s just plain sad that a young woman died back in 1935 from complications following a miscarriage, leaving behind a four year old boy, never seeing him grow up to be a man, a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather himself.

Life is splendid, raw, and searing if you feel anything at all. Breathing in, I love this battering life. Breathing out, I am all these people, forever and ever.