Having known all four of my grandparents, I consider myself very lucky since each brought something different to my life as I was growing up. But, by the time I was 25, they had all passed away and my mother had died as well, after being ill for a few years.
Before she died, I started dating my husband and met his mother, Margaret, who had been widowed when his father died in his early 50s.
When Margaret died in 1996, it was like losing my mother all over again. That’s because I knew her as long as my own mother had been part of my life.
I miss her. Only five feet tall, she was not a pushover. My husband and his brother referred to her as “Sarge,” not completely with affection.
She had no daughters. I think we each took to one another because of that. I was the one who finally married her oldest son. Others had come close and she looked at me a little skeptically when I first starting showing up at her house.
She was tough. From a Scotch-Irish background, she was a twin, though not identical to Ruth. They had an older sister Evelyn that they both agreed was the beauty of the family.
The family name was Hay, which can be found in a Scottish book of registered tartans that traces its lineage back to the time of Robert the Bruce. Remember the Mel Gibson movie “Braveheart.”
My brother-in-law has the family treasure of a photo of Grandfather Hay in full regalia, kilt and all. We have on our wall, over the piano, an oval black-and-white image of a beautiful woman with hair piled high and a gorgeous Edwardian lace dress.
This is Margaret’s mother and I see a resemblance to my daughter in the face that passed from this world before 1920.
Their mother died when the twins were 12 and the girls were somewhat neglected by their father. As one of my husband’s cousins put it a few years back – “he was a philanderer.”
They spent a lot of time on a farm owned by their mother’s sister, whom everyone called Auntie, and with their cousin Charlie, Auntie’s only son. He’s the only one of the four still alive.
I not only got to meet Auntie, but I have a photo of her holding my son.
Margaret was not one to dwell on the past, but you knew she had seen difficult times and challenges. When she married her only husband she lived at first with his Italian mother, who was a pretty tough cookie herself.
I have a photo of her, too, and believe me, you wouldn’t want to get on her bad side. She came to this country from Italy with at least one child in tow and more to come with a husband who did not survive long in this country.
I would sometimes try to imagine Margaret in that milieu and I knew it could not have been easy for her. She was viewed as an outsider, someone who didn’t know how to cook or clean and she had married the favorite youngest son of very protective woman.
She had lost children before my husband. Margaret told me that when he was born, no one told her she would be having a C-section until it was over. I can only guess at how frightening that must have been and marvel at a medical profession that would tell her sister-in-law, but not the patient that surgery was imminent.
When I met Margaret she was living her own life. Still working at the post office job she had begged her husband to let her take when her boys were old enough to get by without her. She was a stay-at-home mom.
My husband recalls those discussions involved tears on his mother’s part as she tried to convince her husband that his wife’s working was not a bad reflection on him.
She was also traveling a lot. She would take cruises; we once went to see her off in the Port of New York as she was on her way to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands.
She also dated and even became engaged to Stanley. They both came to our wedding. She caught the bouquet, Stanley caught the garter. I think it was a set-up.
Never wanting to show favoritism to either son, she wore the same dress to our wedding that she wore to my brother-in-law’s the year before. Then again, maybe Scottish, frugality had something to do with it.
She and Stanley never did marry. Economically savvy but not rich by any means, she said she never wanted to compromise her son’s inheritance.
Through the years when we would visit, it was me to whom she’d tell the details of her trips, and information of what she had been doing.
She and my husband, very much alike in their stubbornness and independent natures, were sometimes at odds and gave each other a wide berth.
When she came to our house, she never interfered, never tired to pull rank. She was the perfect guest. She was also a good listener and I could tell her anything.
When my son and daughter were young, for a few summers running they would go spend a week with grandma, who was not one to plan big events or splashy doings. They’d make Jell-O and baked goodies. She would take them to visit family or to the movies.
Mostly she just let just be kids in a home her husband had built and where they had raised their two sons, in the Bridgewater hills above the town of Bound Brook where she started her married life.
She was not a cuddly grandma or overly protective. She would let my two walk from her house to the little market nearby, which meant navigating across a main road and walking along another. I trusted her, I never questioned her or worried when my children were in her care.
We took care of her in the last stages of the illness that took her life and a number of her friends told me that I was “so good” to take her in, being “only a daughter-in law.” I never saw it that way. It wasn’t out of duty or obligation. I would have done the same for anyone I loved.
Clermont – Like young children’s behavior; we just keep shaking our heads at our friends on the left with their juvenile tantrums and foul language. If long long term fraud and the allowing of all sorts of…