Three Wishes

My grandmother – quite possibly my favorite person on the planet – wanted three things this year. She wanted to meet her great grandsons, my sister’s triplets. She wanted me back in the U.S. And she wanted to die before estate taxes went up.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving – on what would have been her seventy-something wedding anniversary – her last wish was granted. She was 92.

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Last week, when I was trying to describe my grandmother to the rabbi, I jumped from her famously jet black hair to her love of jewelry and anything purple to how proud she was to become a great grandmother and finally gave up and said: “I hope I’ve given you enough.”

“It’s OK,” the rabbi said. “I know the type.”

And I thought: “But you can’t, because she’s an original.”

Doctors, waitresses, bank tellers and pretty much anyone who ever came in contact with her would all say some version of: “Your grandmother is a character,” and she was. Anybody who heard she was in her 90s and was expecting a doddering old lady probably never knew what hit them. She was climbing the Great Wall of China in her 70s, putting my social life to shame in her 80s, and pointing out a tiny error in a bank statement just last month. She was sharp and funny and perfectly accessorized and you never had to wonder where you stood with her – or what she thought (good or very bad) of what you were wearing. One roommate listened to me on the phone laughing and gossiping. “’Bye Grandma,” I said at the end of about a half hour.

“That was your grandmother?” my roommate asked. “I thought you were talking to a friend.”

One of my favorite stories about her: Years ago, after an exhausting day at the hospital when my mother had had an hours-long surgery, we got home and the phone rang. It was a telemarketer. “I’d like to speak to [your husband], please.” I held my breath, but Grandma didn’t pause. “He’s been dead for 10 years – I’d like to speak to him, too.”

As my sister and I drove up to New York from Washington last week, Grandma’s three great-grandsons in the back seat, it was almost a reflex to pull out my phone and call her. My sister and I talked about how much she would have loved that we were together, and all the lines we could still hear her say. How if her food didn’t have steam rising from the top it was “ice cold.” How she’d always ask: “How’s your social life?” How when we made her proud she would say, “My buttons are popping.” Tops on my list of Grandma-isms was how she would start every single phone call: “So what have you got that’s good to tell me?” Last year, I finally said the line was starting to make me feel like I couldn’t call her unless I’d won the Pulitzer Prize or gotten engaged or both, and she answered with uncharacteristic gravity: “Just you calling is a good thing to me.”

A call from her, however, was a very rare event. I can remember my mother saying ruefully: “Ma, the phone works both ways.” The first thing my sister said to me in the hospital after her triplets were born was: “You’re never going to guess who called me.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Grandma,” she answered triumphantly.

Sometime in the past year I asked Grandma why she never picked up the phone to us. She said: “That way I’ll know you really want to speak to me.”

In the last couple of years, often she would say she was too old to be of any help. Yet the next time you spoke to her she would say something like “I woke up thinking about” and it was always the answer to some problem you’d just told her about, even if it was just a passing mention weeks ago. She was always looking for some way to make your life better or prettier, and there was no rack of clothing in some faraway corner of a store that she wouldn’t patiently pick through to find it. “You never know who might have put a size 12 in with the 10s,” she’d say as we rolled our eyes and tried to give up.

“I don’t need that,” we’d sometimes protest.

“Buy it and you’ll find a place to wear it,” she’d say. And as always, she was right.

She suffered great loss in her life – her mother died when she was nine months old, she lived with a foster family, and she buried her husband and both her children -- but she remained an optimist. If not always for herself, but for everyone she cared about she believed something good was just around the corner. I remember telling her once about a date I was going on and saying I couldn’t remember how tall the guy was and whether I could wear heels. “So you’ll know on the second date,” she responded.

She would not feel sorry for herself and did not approve of anyone who wallowed. Last year, when I had little work and less money, I complained that I’d eaten nothing but peanut butter and eggs all week.

“That’s fattening,” she said.

Last week I spoke to my cousin, her only grandson and the only child of Grandma’s son, who died suddenly in 1996. He wasn’t coming to the funeral. Though privately I thought it disgraceful – and was glad Grandma wasn’t around to be hurt by it – I told him not to feel bad. I told him Grandma would probably say what she said when my sister and I wanted to come great distances to see her in the hospital.

“What do you want to do that for?” she’d demand to know. “That’s no fun.”

“Come and see me when I’m home,” she’d add.

Grandma, I wish I could.