Memories from a granddaughter

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My grandma Alice:

On Friday morning, February 19^th, the day after my 22^nd birthday, my grandma Alice died of a heart attack at 87 years old. Some of my friends might remember her visiting Wellesley campus: an unassuming woman, energetic, lively, just under 5 feet tall (not including her wild white curls), equipped with plastic Ziplocs full of Black Lives Matter pins to give to me and my friends. That’s how I remember her.

When I got the news, I risked a Lyft (she refused to use Uber because of the company’s questionable ethics) to Lasell Village, where she lived with her beloved cat, Babette, and took classes at the college ranging from Baldwin, and the ethics of genetic alterations, to poetry, and women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the civil rights movement. My uncle led us in a simple Tahara. I found a letter I had written to her on her bedside table, and a tin of her favorite candy, Ferrero Rocher, that my dad had sent to her (every one of them eaten) on her dining room table.

I remember doing projects about Alice in elementary and middle school, interviewing her, learning about her work in the civil rights movement of the 60s, listening to stories about hosting SNCC talks and fundraisers in their Acton house (that had that indoor balcony that I always loved as a kid). Learning at a young age what it meant to be committed to justice. I remember hearing about Alice and Bert at civil rights protests, and their work against housing discrimination, posing as families looking for homes to root out and report discriminatory landlords who had previously denied a Black or Brown family. I remember hearing about the protests she went to from when she was pregnant in the early 60s, up until just a few years ago. After her death, I learned of a radio interview with her at 77 years old, occupying Wallstreet in Boston. Her words in the interview—“we’re gonna stay”—say more about Alice than anything I could write down. I remember going with her to the annual Indigenous People’s Day March in Plymouth, MA on Thanksgiving in 2018, when she was 85, and it was under 20 degrees out. I remember how cold she looked and yet how happy she was to be there.

One day last year, I was on the phone with her, sitting in my backyard on one of the last nice days of fall in Chatham, New York, and she told me a story. She was remembering a civil rights protest that she went to in her 30s with my grandpa Bert and her oldest son, Mark, at just 3 years old. There had been violence at a recent protest from the police, and people were on edge. She told me how she remembers looking out at the national guard, and her eyes landed on a young man among them, just 20 years old, if that. She was shocked at how young he was. And how scared he looked. Then, as she watched, a group a hippies came down the road carefully placing flowers in the national guard’s guns. She told me about how she thought he did not know why he was there and what he represented.

That was my grandma Alice. She always saw the humanity in the person and would not abide by harm being done. She would remain engaged in social justice movements until her death. In her apartment, where we said our goodbyes on Friday morning, two pride flags stood along multiple plastic bags of Black Lives Matter pins. There were shelves of books by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and others. There was a file folder labeled “Racism” in between “Play” and “Soul Matters”. This was her life in private. She was uninterested in clout or performing to the world. She simply lived by standing up to injustice for its own sake and wanted no attention because of it.

I will remember her for being radically open-minded, in her self-effacing, unpretentious way. When you had a conversation with her, she earnestly wanted to hear about you as a person and her whole being was there with you.

I will remember her for being fundamentally optimistic. When she fell off her garden wall at 70 and broke a few ribs, we were sent a picture of her in a hospital bed with two thumbs up. When her car suddenly went up in flames in 2011, she sent us an email entitled “A strange transformation of my car, with pictures” telling the story of how her Toyota Corolla changed from “red to black to silver, all in one week!” finding humor and delight in the adventure.

I remember her singing me happy birthday, not just off-tune but to some new tune altogether, smiling wide.

I remember how she loved trees. I remember walking with her through campus, stopping at every plant to prune and inspect it. I remember how she loved their house in Acton, on 11 Flagg Rd, surrounded by trees and deer and wild turkey. I remember how I would always give her my plants at the end of the semester, barely clinging to life, and she would return them at the end of break, vibrant and green and happy.

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I remember one day, as she was visiting us in San Diego, she picked an unidentified fruit off a tree as we were walking, and after trying in vain to determine what kind of fruit it was, she plopped it in her mouth. And I remember whenever she came to visit us, she would plant something in our yard, and it would thrive until she left. I remember how she loved her garden plot at Lasell and how we would visit it every time I came to see her.

On top of all that, she was incredibly smart. After acing a logic test published in the newspaper that led to a job and dropping out of college in her 20s, she went work as a female computer engineer before being a computer engineer was really a profession. Then, she went back to get her degree, as a mom of three teen boys, and then went on to take college courses in her retirement until the end of her life.

She was the person I looked up to the most in the world, I feel honored to have been able to grow up with her in my life, and I will miss her every day. I’m grateful that her home/college was only 20 min from mine, and I’m grateful that I was able to get to know her as a young adult. I hope to go through the world with half as much humanity and compassion and joy that you did.

Thank you, Grandma Alice.

So much love from me,

Annika