Eudene the Raccoon

I learned of my maternal grandmother’s death while I was on a ghost tour at Lizzie Borden’s house in Fall River, Massachusetts. Don’t worry—a ghost didn’t tell me. My mom did, by cell phone.

I was taking the tour as part of an assignment for my job as a travel editor. Ordinarily, I don’t court the paranormal, preferring to let the dead rest in peace.

When my other grandma passed away, she did appear in my dreams several nights later. Does that count as a ghostly visitation? Or is that merely a clear-cut example of dreams as wish fulfillment?

In the dream, I was in the living room of my Aunt Teresa’s old house, and there, miraculously, was Grandma Jewel. I felt extremely relieved. “I’m so happy to see you,” I told her. “We all thought you were gone and we were so sad.”

Like death was just some big misunderstanding.

My remaining grandma, who I called Grandma Maudie or Gram for short, passed away on September 14 at the age of 87.

Up until Parkinson’s disease slowed her down and then froze her in place, Gram had a natural vigor that could flare into a startling ferocity, sometimes even when she was carrying out an ordinary task. You should have seen her scramble an egg.

She wasn’t the mushy-gushy type of grandmother. I recall, for instance, that after the funeral of my grandpa—to whom she was fiercely devoted through 65 years of marriage—Gram remarked that what one mourner had said by way of condolence “sure was stupid.”

“Maybe she didn’t know what to say,” my mom said.

“She could have said nothing,” Gram replied, as usual never ceding a centimeter to fools and fakes.

As a lifelong devotee of feisty women, I tended to find her barbs funny and her toughness admirable, though I wish for her sake it hadn’t been forged in the crucible of an unfathomably difficult upbringing involving grinding poverty, a mother who died early, and a father who could be rough.

Life may have given Gram a hard exterior, but she had soft qualities, too, like a capacity for unconditional loyalty and an appetite for artistic expression via the many quilts and crafts she churned out over the years.

After the funeral, Mom let me take a cross-stitched raccoon that Gram had made. It was hanging on her bedroom wall in a thick wooden frame made by my grandpa. I put up the critter next to the front door in my own apartment and christened the raccoon Eudene.

That was Gram’s middle name, which she loathed. She wasn’t too crazy about her first name, either, arguing that Maudie seemed better suited to an old mule.

She gave me my first sip of coffee, which she took black and drank by the gallon. Sometimes she and Grandpa would stop in at a diner for dessert and as the server approached with menus, Gram would say, “We’re just having pie and coffee, hon.” (Don’t you think “Pie and Coffee, Hon” would be a good name for a bakery?)

When I was staying with her and Grandpa for a week one summer, I found a book of Bible trivia and followed Gram around as she did her housework so that I could ask her every single question. She got most of them wrong but never lost patience.

She had zero patience, however, for the United States Postal Service or dubious claims in commercials. “Ain’t done it,” she’d say to the TV in a tone of withering contempt only she could muster.

She made an excellent German chocolate cake.

She called me Zachie.