My grandmother died last Friday.
She had been in hospice care at my parents’ house for a month or so, following a stroke in August, but it was still a bit of a shock when I got the call on Friday. She was in hospice last summer, too (she had had a stroke and a fall down the stairs (in some order) a few days before her 95th birthday in March, then tested positive for Covid while rehabbing in a nursing home, then had another stroke in May), but was kicked out in September for not dying fast enough. It would’ve been only a little surprising if she had rallied again this time.
She was born in the Bronx in 1925, the seventh of eight kids (though there was a significant gap between her and her baby brother Richard), most of whom lived past 90. She met my grandfather around the start of WWII; he served in the Army in Italy, and she told me once that he was on a ship in the Suez Canal headed for the Pacific when Japan surrendered. They were married in the fall of 1945, just about as soon as could be arranged once he got back to New York, and my Uncle Dan and my mom (seen in the photo above in 2017) were born on the very leading edge of the Baby Boom. They bought a house in Mineola in 1949 or 1950, and she lived there until everything went to hell in 2020.
Back in August, Kate and I took the kids down to New York City for the weekend, and we stayed in her house (which was being cared for by her neighbors, who were practically part of the family). When I put the address into Google to check restaurant options, I got the inevitable Zillow link, which claimed it was “1BR, 1 bath.” That’s spectacularly wrong, but understandable: since she was the only owner in the 70-odd years it’s been standing, there’s no way an Internet-era company would have any idea what’s inside.
My grandfather died some years before I was born, so she was always singular to me and my sister and cousins. In the family, she was “Grum Grum,” after my oldest cousin’s attempt to say “Grandma” when he was just learning to talk; it was later shortened to “Grums.” She had six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren (the youngest of whom just recently started school), and doted on all of us/them; no holiday passed without cards for us and the kids, with SteelyKid and The Pip getting each getting $5 with every card. (Kate and I got larger gifts at longer intervals…)
Back in the 1970’s, when she was about the age I am now, she would take me and my two oldest cousins (one a couple years older than me, the other a year younger) for a week or so during the summer, to give our parents a break. Those are some of my most cherished childhood memories— going to museums and the Bronx Zoo, to the courthouse where she worked (she was in the Nassau County Surrogate’s Court until the mid-1990’s), up to West Point (my uncle graduated from the USMA in the mid-1960’s), to Chinatown for dinner, to the Belmont racetrack, and sometimes to Yankee Stadium (one of my mom’s cousins used to work in the box office there, and would hook us up with sweet tickets). Jones Beach on Long Island remains one of my favorite spots on Earth in large part because of those summers. We were in a minor car accident with her during the famous Blackout of 1977, and I have a weirdly vivid memory of my cousin Dan scaring the shit out of me that year by describing the Son of Sam murders (God knows how he’d heard about them…).
I have a hard time imagining myself at 50 taking care of three kindergarten-age boys solo, but she did it. Of course, there were a lot more family around, then. Two of her sisters and one of her brothers also lived on Long Island, and a whole mob of my mom’s cousins, so when we did anything, we did it with a small army. Those Jones Beach trips looked a lot like we were setting out to battle Rommel in the Sahara, for the number of coolers and chairs and blankets we’d haul across the sand, but it allowed the adults to combine forces to supervise a double-digit number of kids tiring ourselves out in the ocean. (They would illicitly work their way through several cases of beer, surreptitiously poured into in white plastic cups from some Shriner event, to provide plausible deniability from the lifeguards. The 70’s were a different time…)
When we were there in August, we went down to the basement, which I recall as the scene of numerous raucous family parties for birthdays and holidays. SteelyKid and The Pip, being of a smaller generation, were amused to hear about the concept of the “kids’ table,” where six or eight of us would eat off a card table on the other side of the stairs from the 20-odd adults packed around long folding tables. I don’t think they believed me about the numbers, or the age you had to be to get to eat with the grown-ups, but I swear it was all true.
Most of that sprawling family is gone now. She was the last of her generation, and most of my parents’ and basically all of mine have moved away. Long Island is weirdly quiet these days, at least from the Wedel/ Ryan family standpoint.
In more recent years, she was a fixture at events elsewhere, joining us for Thanksgivings and Christmases, birthdays and graduations and weddings. She arranged a couple of big trips with all the cousins, one a cruise in 2005 for her 80th birthday and the other a week in Mexico in 2017, where SteelyKid and The Pip were introduced to the rest of their generation. She wasn’t quite as active a participant as when I was a kid, though she still surprised folks outside the family: a party for one of her five-year birthdays was held at a venue that was also hosting a wedding or something, and one of the staff assured us that they would make sure nobody from the other party got so raucous as to disturb her. “You’ve got that backwards,” we replied. That was a great party, and we ran the staff ragged fetching us bottles of wine and beer.
She loomed enormously large over the family, a loving but also intimidating presence. She sometimes seemed less a relative than a force of nature. Hearing that she’s gone is like being told that the planet Jupiter just up and disappeared; it’s almost too huge a loss to comprehend.
One of the last steps in writing A Brief History of Timekeeping was to fill in the dedication, and given the topic and her influence, that was no real challenge. I wrote: “For my grandmother, Ann Ryan, who is such a pivotal part of our family history.” I got the page proofs right around the time she went into the hospital back in August, and printed out the opening pages so my mom could show them to her. She read it, and said “I feel very proud.” But nowhere near as proud as I am to have been her grandson.
I’m so sorry for your loss…Annie will certainly be missed!! Thank you for sharing all those memories… definitely put a smile on my face! We were very fortunate to be a part of the “Wedel” family! They were amazing.. I can’t believe they are gone…Janine