My Grandmother died on a cold, dark Winter Solstice night.
We had driven the eight-hour drive to Ohio from Georgia because the end was near. When we arrived people were already gathering in the room that wasn’t hers, in a place that felt foreign, but with a shared spirit that was undeniably familiar.
It’s an unshakable feeling, gathering for death to come.
My grandmother rode Harley Davidson motorcycles and carried a gun in her bra. She listened to the crackling of a police scanner every night in her home, wanting to be alerted if any friends or family might need her help.
She raised some hell in her life, and she raised some hell raisers too.
Doris. That was her name.
Is her name.
Doris was one of seven children and the oldest daughter of four, born in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky. She told stories about making sandwiches for her brothers to eat at school, her dad bringing penny candy home from the store, and adventures outside with her two older brothers.
She was eleven years old when she went to work for a family as live-in domestic help.
She was the Help. At eleven years old.
And she was the ripe old age of fourteen when she moved to the big city of Louisville, Kentucky hired by another family.
I think about her in a burlap sack dress, living with her large family where she took on a motherly role to make sure her brothers were fed for school, helped her own mother ring a chicken’s neck so they could have dinner, and waited for her daddy to surprise her with a piece of penny candy, and then she was shipped off to work for other families all on her own.
I don’t know if she was paid Help or if they simply agreed to keep her alive in exchange for the duties of the job.
I know those duties included helping with infant children and I can’t bear to think about other duties she may have been required to perform.
I never asked what her brothers did during this time and I wish I knew. Eventually one of them was old enough to enlist in the Army. The other learned to work in concrete. Both of them laid concrete paths, porches, steps, foundations, and just about anything else for miles around the city of Cincinnati until they were well into their 80s.
My grandmother’s husband worked with them too.
He wasn’t a great guy, but I do have some fond memories of him including the image of squirrels coming to their second floor apartment window when my grandma was cooking breakfast and he was sitting in the kitchen booth. Birds would also visit the window, eager for the food he would leave on the sill.
We ate squirrel back then, and it was even possible that my grandma would be frying up squirrel for breakfast while another one came to the window to be fed.
Come to think of it, that fond memory of squirrels visiting the window has suddenly fallen flat.
My grandmother’s husband wasn’t my mom’s dad and didn’t like the fact that there were two girl-children in my grandma’s life already, so he pushed them out. He didn’t really like girls in general, his attitude toward me compared to my brother made that crystal clear.
Enough about him already.
He died when I was fairly young, and she never remarried. She never had another significant romantic relationship as far as I know unless you count the young Chippendale dancer she made friends with for years and Hank, the old married guy who sold Christmas trees.
We got a big, beautiful, live tree from him every year.
My grandma had probably had her fill of men by the time her husband died.
Scratch that. She still loved men, very much so. She favored all boys and men. But I do think she was done with a man having control in her life.
Let’s sit with that for a minute.
My grandmother was a beloved woman, tightly knitted to her siblings but especially her sisters, known and adored by all the regulars in the corner bar and the local diner, well-tended to by her children, intimately loved by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She fed people, hugged people, gave them rides, bought their medications, fed them some more, danced with them, laughed with them, served them drinks, cried with them, gave them money, fought for them (like for real, fought for them).
She was bigger than life really. A giant.
She was tall and had a straight back, perfectly coifed hair, strong walk, and a voice that could switch from the sweetest to the snarkiest at the drop of a dime.
The quick raise of the eyebrows told you what was coming.
She dressed in a sequined gown every year to attend the formal ball for the Ohio Bar Owners Association (one of her sisters, my Aunt Betty, owned that corner bar for decades).
She drove a black mustang.
She could say, “I’m gonna whoop your ass” just as easily as she could say “hello.” And she would pull that pistol out of her bra without thinking twice.
You couldn’t help but love her. And I think we were all a bit in awe of her.
But she had some flaws.
Mostly these were about preferring and protecting boys and men, while harshly criticizing and diminishing girls and women.
Yes, I know how backwards that sounds, but many strong women have internalized sexism and misogyny. That is the devastating truth about patriarchy and the deep cuts it makes in us – all of us.
Even with her bigger-than-life divine feminine power, she didn’t encourage or recognize that power in other girls and women. Or, more true to the point, she criticized it in others, even put them down. Surely this was something she had been criticized about her whole life as well. I’m sure she was called a b with an itch more than her fair share simply because she was strong, direct, outspoken, and powerful. Then she turned around and did the same to others. It seemed that she was the only one allowed to embody that power and others, it seemed, were expected to stay in their submissive place.
And take care of the men.
Goodness, she could be mean as a snake when it came to all the women who loved her sons and grandsons.
This may have created some pretty serious conflict and unhealthy relationships, even though I’m sure she didn’t see it that way. She was “protecting” them, in her eyes. Like I said she had some flaws, and thankfully some of us have done the hard work of growing out and healing from those.
Honestly, she could also be mean as a snake to any of us girls and women in the family and then turn around and be loving and devoted. It must have been a long and shaky road being her daughter, a road that was a little less mine-filled once my generation came along, and a road that was downright kind once my daughter’s generation came along.
In fact my grandma agreed to stop saying hateful things when my young daughter was around. I told her, in one of the hardest conversations I’ve had in my life, that I wouldn’t bring Hayden to her house if she said things that were hateful about girls, women, immigrants, or Black people. She kept her word, and my sweet daughter grew up watching Price Is Right, Two And a Half Men, and Two Broke Girls with a doting and devoted great-grandmother.
We humans tend to think in terms of people being good or bad, loving or hateful, strong or weak, but these binaries close us off from being with people and all their (and our) complexities as we each travel our journeys on this earth.
But it’s dwelling in the nuance where we learn, where we grow.
Oh those darn nuances. Life would be so much easier for us humans if things were simply this way or that way.
Eleven years ago today, this beautiful, complicated, life force of a human who I get to call my mammaw slipped away into the longest night. And today I dwell in the powerful meaning I get to make of an eleven-year-old child hired as domestic help who grew in lightness and darkness, to make the life she made. Sparks of that life live on everywhere I look, and some splinters of that life must die with her so we can grow and evolve in love.
So this Winter Solstice is for you, Doris, and the final lesson you taught us all: darkness is not to be feared, but a place where you can find comfort, security, and peace so you may rise again with the light, transformed.