The oldest woman in my family, my grandmother, died four months ago on the night before her 94th birthday. Her voice, to her dying day, was loud and rough and jarring. This may seem like a strange thing to focus on, but not if you consider that she was a woman whose entire world was structured to teach her what she said wasn’t worth listening to.
She wasn’t alone in this way, of course. One day last year, I was thinking about the erasure of aging women in our culture and searched for the term “venerable women.” I was curious about what images of wise and respected women the world produces. Google’s seemingly baffled autocorrect responded, tellingly: “Do you mean venerable men or vulnerable women?”
For decades, I pestered my grandmother with questions whenever I saw her. She was born in the Ottoman Empire, in what is now Jordan. The family fairy tale was that a young, handsome man — her father — gallantly rode into a village and swept a beautiful girl off her feet. We forget that fairy tales are all told from some perspective, however, and this one — like so many others — had a man’s. Whenever I asked my grandmother about her childhood, she began: “My father was a hard man. My mother, po diable, was sick.”
Her voice, to her dying day, was loud and rough and jarring. This may seem like a strange thing to focus on, but not if you consider that she was a woman whose entire world was structured to teach her what she said wasn’t worth listening to.
A “hard man” is one who, at age 21, took a 14-year-old girl and “made her his bride.” They were married, and she gave birth to seven children. Their family, part of a flood of Christians who spread out across the world as Empire collapsed, made their way to Haiti. My grandmother, who was three when she arrived, lived there in the unending chaos and violence of colonialism, American occupation, and Haitian dictatorship.
When I pressed her and her friends for details of her childhood, they inevitably talked of her mother. She sat, they said, for years, slack-jawed, eyes blank, trembling incessantly, in a rocking chair on the veranda of their house. Everyone said she was mad, but I thought it made more sense that she’d been left speechless by the incomprehensibility of her life. My great-grandfather, on the other hand, was a jovial, hale and hearty man about town. We loved him very much – he was fun and affectionate. Tradition and misogyny are complicated, and at the time no one was equipped with words like marital rape, post-traumatic stress, patriarchy, or postpartum depression.
A “hard father” and a severely damaged mother might cow a person, but my grandmother was fierce and resilient. She didn’t brood. “Po diable,” an affectionate way of saying “poor devil” in Creole, was her sole summation of her mother’s life. She would segue seamlessly, saying nothing and everything, to “I never let anyone touch me.” That truth landed her in jail one day after she fought a Duvalier henchman who sexually harassed her in the Port-Au-Prince airport.
As a young woman, she was glittery, vivacious, flirtatious, and brazen. She smoked and played cards with men. She never turned down a good party, and she was famous for throwing her own. That she sought pleasure, and defined what that meant for herself, was clear from the fact that when she was 23, she married my grandfather. When they met, she broke off an engagement to someone else. My grandfather was a foreigner in every way, and she took a huge risk. He had laughing blue eyes, and being of Anglo descent was, to her, the exotic. When they married, they didn’t speak any of the same languages sufficiently enough to hold a complete conversation.
My grandfather defined my grandmother’s life. He was a warm and thoughtful father and, to me, the best grandfather imaginable. Their marriage, however, was a 45-year slow-motion disaster, leaving wreckage in its wake. It was punctuated by periods of joy, adventure, and prolonged intemperate exchanges. My grandfather’s approach to marriage was symbolically bookended by two early-1970s phenomena: Pan American Airlines and Playboy. I was in my grandmother’s kitchen one day in 1975 when she called him during one of his business trips to Columbia. A woman answered, and when my grandmother explained that she, his wife, wanted to speak to him, the woman said, “I’m his wife.” Decades later, our family got a letter from three siblings in Mexico, apparently his children, trying to find him. He managed, remarkably, to simultaneously be a philanderer and a bigamist and a pious Anglican who didn’t drink and taught his children, under threat of the switch, to never lie.
Divorce was not an option for a woman like my grandmother — she was Catholic, uneducated and socialized to understand her vocation as a wife. And, besides, she’d chosen him of her own accord. He hadn’t ridden in on a horse and taken her. He’d flown in and asked nicely.
She took care of him long after he could no longer take care of himself, and she wasn’t gracious about it. It was hard and thankless work that he frequently made harder. Nurturing was not a word easily associated with her, unless it had to do with her fruit plants. Until late in life, her approach to her offspring could be likened more to a bulldozer run amok in a field than a gardener’s deliberate tending of a garden. For long periods, she ceded the parenting of her children to others. Critics were rife, but no one seemed to consider why she did what she did.
When we, a passel of grandchildren, were little, a hug from her was an act of aggression, to be strategically avoided. When she saw us coming, she would lock us out of her house with a jug of water that we had to stretch amongst our many selves for the duration of long afternoons in the brutal heat of her yard. This was a woman who might hit us with a fly swatter that seemed to be grafted to her arm if we complained. Though we all knew she loved us, for a long time, if you’d asked, we couldn’t have said how we knew. You had to pay attention. Which was, actually, precisely what she needed and loved.
When I was five, she let me comb her hair. Until then, I thought the tight, elegant black bun on the back of her head was just the way her hair grew. The first day I saw it cascade down her back, I thought she’d performed magic and was amazed. She had a secret, hiding in plain sight.
She not only condoned but cultivated mischief. As a toddler, I routinely jumped off of her refrigerator, yelling, “Catch me!” I have no memory of her telling me to stop, but I also I have no memory of splitting my head open on her kitchen floor. She caught me every time.
She snuck out of the house with my sister to teach her how to smoke and curse.
She saved chocolate in her freezer that each one of her many grandchildren thought was theirs alone.
She peeled our grapes for us.
When I was ten, she let me alone come inside from the heat so I could read in my grandfather’s study, a kindness that, after more than an year, ended abruptly the day she realized I was quietly making my way through my grandfather’s pulp fiction porn collection.
That was on one of many Sunday afternoons, always spent at her house. Each Sunday I came to think of as The Yelling of The Men, who would debate furiously as the women swirled around them. Waves of food that took my grandmother hours, sometimes days to prepare, we consumed in a handful of chaotic minutes.
Well into adulthood, I heard her described as miserly, difficult, loud, unreasonable, dramatic, selfish, and unladylike. Her stubborn and instinctive unwillingness to conform made people uncomfortable, and they fell back on stereotypes, the truth being so uncomfortable. But where they saw a penny-pincher, I saw a smart and pragmatic woman who understood her financial situation and was trying to plan. Where they saw unreasonable, I saw a woman who knew she was playing a long game and would do what she had to, even if others failed to understand. Where they saw selfishness, I saw her insistence that she mattered as an individual, not as an eternal handmaiden. She would work, for pay, instead of taking care of everyone else and their children.
Her independence, her expectation of respect, and her refusal to provide unpaid labor that was taken for granted were all viewed as “unnatural.” So, too, was her “callousness” in parenting, sending her children away when they were young. Only after talking to her many times did I come to appreciate the profound sadness of her choice — she knew her children were much safer elsewhere, and she couldn’t, in polite society, say why.
She was vain, everyone said. But this, too, was a deliberate misunderstanding. To her dying day, she demanded to be allowed to live with dignity, which is not the same thing as vanity. Last summer, while she was slowly dying, the nurses in the hospital nicknamed her “The Ninja” because she physically fought with them. She was 4’10” tall and sometimes three, four nurses could not make her agree to procedures that would make their jobs a little easier. When I heard that, I laughed out loud.
As a child, I’d quietly studied her every move. As an adult, I realized, she had always filled me with a secret glee. A few years after my grandfather died, my grandmother’s difficult, tough and abrasive turned to soft, generous, and considerate. She would pat your hand. She’d send you kisses over the phone. She’d say out loud that she loved you, your children and their children. She would send great- and great-great-grandchildren she’d never know $10 in the mail. For years, this surprised me.
We know and care so little for older women’s thoughts and experiences, their knowing and sharing. But old women, despite everything we’re taught, are worth listening to.
Here was a wise old woman, never considered smart, who lived unapologetically. Spoke her mind. Intuited the difference between being sociable and being true to oneself, being popular and not. She showed us how to be self-sufficient, something still not to be taken for granted when you’re a girl basted in benevolent sexism. She taught us to seek love, even if it was flawed; to work hard, to care quietly, to complain loudly, to be loyal and firm. She was an example of the much disputed idea that people can change over time. She did of all of this without giving any of us more than a few scant words of direct advice. In other words, this old woman with no power trusted us to know what was best for ourselves, something rooms full of old men with too much power can have serious problems understanding.
We know and care so little for older women’s thoughts and experiences, their knowing and sharing. But old women, despite everything we’re taught, are worth listening to. Google’s question in response to my search was actually an insightful one because, in point of fact, wherever and whenever only men are venerable, women have been and will continue to be vulnerable.
When my grandmother died, her face was deeply etched with lines. But she was beautiful and her smile was dazzling. This year, for the first time in 94 years, she isn’t here to chide, cajole, cackle, muse, demand, or regale. I have so many questions that I can’t ask her. While I miss her presence, I can’t find it in myself to be sad. There is so much that I’ll forget, but I will always remember that on her 85th birthday, on the hottest day of the year, I left the dance floor at two in the morning and she stayed until the sun came up.
Her name was Julia. She was a very old woman with a very loud voice.
This makes my heart ache.
I loved this. Your grandmother sounds like an amazing woman, and you’re right – old women and their stories are too often overlooked. Thank you for this piece. I look forward to reading more!
Wow, I really loved this essay. What a beautiful tribute.
Your relationship with your grandmother sounds beautiful and magical and I am grateful you shared your memories of her with us. Thank you.
What a beautiful piece, filled with love and respect for your grandmother.
Well that was lovely and makes me want to be ornery for life. Thank you.
I’ll be sending this essay to several women in my family and acquaintance.
This was so beautiful and heartwarming. Grandmothers are awesome.
This is beautiful. Crying at my desk!
This was gorgeous – thank you!
Your grandmother sounds dazzling, someone her friends were so lucky to know. And you write about her so well.
This is an incredible tribute and a pleasure to read.
Oh man, I love this. Your account makes your grandmother fascinating and distant and accessible all at the same time, and it’s lovely. I’ve deliberately cultivated relationships with all the older women I can fit in my life, because their experience is so valuable and so rarely heard, and this story is a beautiful tribute to your grandmother. Thank you.
This is just marvellous. I loved the part where you described your grandmother as trusting people to know what’s best for them, and how rooms full of “venerable men” find this so hard to understand.
My ‘difficult’ grandmother scared me as a child, but I really admire her as an adult. She travelled the world with a squad of awesome ladies exploring archeological sites, even going behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War. She did exactly as she pleased and that wasn’t easy for everyone, but she made an important contribution to her field. I’d like to have known her as an adult.
I want a book about your grandmother immediately. Please write one.
You know, I might just do that! Including the memorable episode where she parked her car right in front of a JCB that was supposed to be demolishing some medieval city walls, and refused to move until the demolition was called off 🙂
!!!!!!! Do it !!!!!!!
I felt the same way about my aunt – as a kid she scared me but now that we’re adults she is my favorite relative and someone I deeply admire for being strong and independent and a little brusque. I wonder if there’s something to that? Were they just bad at relating to kids or did we pick up on the strangeness as children and fear it?
In my grandmother’s case, she wasn’t good at relating to kids (including her own). She was incredibly single-minded in her academic pursuits and didn’t really have any mental bandwidth left over for social skills. I don’t condone all her behaviour – she was often rude and somewhat abusive, but I do understand why children especially just Werent Her Thing. She was quite remote too, and very old when I knew her, so there was just nothing for me to relate to as a child. It’s interesting that even those who didn’t like her much always respected her for her intellect and fearlessness. She always commanded respect.
One of the greatest treasures feminism has given me is the fact that I asked my grandmother – born in the south of France, educated in Paris, married to a Brit, wife of a scab doctor and (currently) living in Edmonton, AB – to tell me her version of her story. Thank you for sharing Julia’s.
This made me miss my own grandmothers, also venerable women. Thank you.
This is incredible & made my heart knot up in my chest for all venerable grandmothers, and especially my own mostly silent & venerable grandmother, who is incredibly stern and ruthless at board games & card games and only started telling us she loved us when she could just add ‘ly’ to the end of a text message, always had nougat & brötchen & babybels & caviar for us, wanted to go to art school & once (a rarity I didn’t even see & was only told about by my sister) cried describing her time working in WWII, because it was the only time she was ever free (she went from her abusive mother’s household to working on the Enigma machines to my abusive grandfather’s household, where she still lives). God.
My heart is breaking at this story, for your grandmother and for the countless women like her who were and still are condemned to lives of quiet desperation.
(Not saying your grandmother’s life has all been sadness of course, I just found that account of her mourning her brief period of freedom so moving)
Utterly beautiful. Such a moving tribute to someone who comes across as pretty amazing. We should all listen to old women. They have much to teach us. If we, as a society, decide to ignore them, we miss much.
Well written. You have touched something universal in your readers.
I miss my Nanny so much now, and I miss your grandmother too.
There have been so many things I’ve learned in the last three or four years about womanhood and living from The Toast (and elsewhere, but mostly essays like this here at The-Toast.net), and I regret so much that I missed out on asking my Nanny about her experiences, because I didn’t realize they were things to ask, because I couldn’t handle the dementia of her last few years (I missed her so much then, and seeing her but not really seeing “her” was too much you know? and i was depressed and young and spent my time asleep instead).
I’m really glad that you’ve shared your grandmother’s story with us, and that she isn’t forgotten.
Thank you for this. Bless my grandmother, who also did not easily accept expectations that she labor without pay. Too rightly she shouted at me for losing my boot in the muddy patch she warned us to avoid; too right to be disgruntled with me for oversleeping. Only many years later did my mother let me know the domestic abuse my grandmother endured. And still her home always smelled like pure spring water, and still we ate roast chicken. Amazing strength.
Love this. ❤️
I loved this. My own grandma is 105 this year, and I doubt she will live for another year but she keeps beating the odds so who can say? She is the most resilient person I have ever known. I should call her tomorrow.
I loved this essay, so fantastic to read–thank you for sharing your grandmother’s story.
Love this SO SO MUCH. I am in tears for real over here.
my own g-ma once referred to a close friend as an “old battle-axe.” (in her eulogy, sadly) I’d never heard the term, and I asked about it afterwards: “A battle-axe is what they used to call women who wouldn’t take shit from nobody. Well, I like it. All my favorite people are battle axes.”
Your grandma sounds like a real Battle-Axe – thanks for sharing a little bit her light with us.
Thank you for reading this. Your comment really made me think that we shouldn’t all be waiting for eulogies.
My eyes are stinging. Thinking of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers and how very different their worlds were from mine (one of them died at 34 from heart failure after bearing six children to an abusive drunk man, disgraced because “out of wedlock”). I know much more of the history of my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, confusing mixtures of spirit and conformity, of sadness and rebellion.
It makes me happy to hear of Julia’s very loud voice.
Sometimes, when I talk to women and hear these stories, I think hard about inheritable trauma. Julia’s mother lost the ability to speak entirely, although, actually, it wasn’t ability, since she spoke when she wanted to. I’m glad, too, that Julia kept hers.
Oh, man, this has me weeping away. My grandmother died well into her 90s after a complicated life, and as my mother said in her eulogy, “When an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.” The worst part of her aging was that, while her mind stayed sharp and she was a lifelong storyteller, in the last few years of her life her vocal cords separated and she could only speak in a whisper. Here’s to old women with loud voices.
Your mom’s words are so striking. Thank you for sharing this.
Your mom's words are so striking. Thank you for sharing this.
Sometimes, when I talk to women and hear these stories, I think hard about inheritable trauma. Julia's mother lost the ability to speak entirely, although, actually, it wasn't ability, since she spoke when she wanted to. I'm glad, too, that Julia kept hers.
Thank you for reading this. Your comment really made me think that we shouldn't all be waiting for eulogies.
A beautiful piece. I bet she would be honoured to read it.
I wasn’t sure whether to run this or not, but I think she would have been tickled, so I did.
A beautiful piece. I bet she would be honoured to read it.
What beautiful writing. This made me feel less rejected by my grown children just for being myself. I will continue to be myself. I am 82 years of age.
I am so happy to read this! Thank you for taking the time and for commenting here.
Wow, Soraya. This was really beautiful.
Makes me recall how lucky I am to have my grandma still in my life. In many ways, she reminds me of your grandmother.
Thank you so much
I am so happy to read this! Thank you for taking the time and for commenting here.
Thank you so much
I wasn't sure whether to run this or not, but I think she would have been tickled, so I did.
I spent last weekend with my 92 year old auntie. She used to work for Bing Crosby back when he had a radio show. We watched a movie on Turner classics, and she had met almost everyone in the film (including Judy Garland!) just from them coming in and out of the office back then. NEVER underestimate the older ladies. Their combined experience could power the universe.