For Grandmother Joy

Eleven years later

Eleven years ago today, I gave the eulogy at my Grandmother Joy’s funeral. She died peacefully after living with severe dementia for years. I know many of you have your own Grandmother Joys, and I know many of you are Grandmother Joys to others. I share this eulogy as a celebration of all the great loves and angels in our lives.

A few years ago, my dad had to jump through a number of bureaucratic hoops because his mother had too many names. On official forms, her name appeared in variations: Joy Thurman, Colleen Joy Atherton, Colleen J. Thurman, and so on. If you’ve spent much time with my dad and grandmother, you can imagine the mutual irritation and colorful discussions that ensued until this problem was solved.

In hindsight, it might have been fitting that she had too many names—she was a rich tapestry of a woman, and I’m not sure that any of us saw every thread that made her so special. I can only speak about her as Kimberly and I knew and loved her: as our Grandmother Joy, who gave us her undivided attention, spent countless hours teaching us to play cards, and kept a never-ending supply of Reese’s peanut butter cups stashed in her silverware drawer.

Grandmother Joy was unique in my life. She never fawned over my achievements. She was proud of me just because I was her granddaughter. I think I felt a sense of honesty and rawness and unconditional love with her that made me trust her in a way I didn’t and haven’t trusted many people since. Because of that trust, I discussed with her all of my major life dilemmas, as they existed in the middle and high school years. At her kitchen table, usually over a game of rummy or Rook, Grandmother Joy taught me to solve problems by viewing them with the optimism of a person devoted to her faith, the kind of pragmatism that only comes from living on a dairy farm—where Christmas dinner can be interrupted by seeing cows escaping the field and roaming the snow-covered porch and where the driveway has to be graveled to support the weight of milk trucks, and a sense of humor made of charming expressions, witty observations, and a little well-timed profanity.

Since the onset of her Alzheimer’s disease, I have wished more times than I can count to be able to sit at that table and talk through my questions with her. Fortunately, she gave me some generally-applicable principles to hold, and I think most problems can be solved by following this wisdom from Grandmother Joy:

1. Life is too short to sell apples. It’s remarkable to me that Grandmother Joy, a woman from Livermore, Kentucky, graduated from college in the early 1950s. But she was remarkable. After earning her degree, she came back to McLean County and started teaching at Liberty School in Buck Creek. As she told the story, her teaching career could be counted in days and ended abruptly when she raised the concern that her classroom was not properly equipped with sufficient amounts of toilet paper. She was told that many teachers sold apples to students and used the proceeds to purchase additional supplies. Grandmother Joy responded with a very colorful version of, “I won’t be doing that,” and that was the end of her tenure as a teacher. I love that she exercised this independence and, at such a young age, knew exactly what did and didn’t work for her.

2. You are responsible for your own fun. Grandmother Joy knew that life is what you make it, and she intended to make it fun. She put marshmallows in jello, made necklaces out of dandelions, cut thousands of pieces of construction paper into paper chains to count down to the next holiday or vacation or semester. She hummed Frank Sinatra and seemed to float around her kitchen while cooking dinner. She wore lipstick on Saturdays. She turned a trip to the Island Dairy Freeze into an adventure. Grandmother Joy did not waste time; she always found a way to make the mundane feel special.

3. Make time to take care of yourself. One of the things I admired the most about Grandmother Joy was that she had a definite beauty regimen. She had a standing weekly appointment at the beauty shop to set her hair (and from that came so many stories…especially when she felt someone else was trying to usurp her appointment time). Her posture was impeccable and spoke to her comfort in her own skin. She nearly always overdressed for the occasion, and she had a style—bold prints, bright red, perfectly-coordinated costume jewelry, knee highs, and closed-toed shoes. She dressed this way for everything—even on days when we were freezing corn (a task she absolutely hated!), Grandmother was put together in her way. I have developed a little ritual of sitting with her in my car right before I go into the office—I check my powder and hear her voice saying, “ladies wear lipstick” as I choose a brown, pink, or red.

4. Savor good stories. Storytelling was at the top of the list of Grandmother Joy’s gifts. She not only had a way with words, but a way with intonation and facial expressions and comedic timing. She told stories over and over—they never got old, and most improved with every telling. I never met her Aunt Bess, but I feel a certain kinship with Bess because of her penchant for being cold—Grandmother Joy always perfectly delivered the line about Londa saying, “wrap up, Bess!” She loved to tell us about Bess commenting that a cake Londa made was “so sweet” and Londa offering to make Bess a sour cake. Best of all, Grandmother Joy would shake with laughter herself every time she told these stories. She savored them…she was never too cynical to revisit a classic and enjoy it as though it was the first telling.

5. You have to go where there is opportunity. Grandmother occasionally told me about my dad heading off to college and worrying about being so far away from home. She told him (and later me when I moved to Lexington) that “they can’t put the University of Kentucky on Barrett Hill Road.” I can’t think of a better way to say that life isn’t always going to be convenient, comfortable, or close to home.

6. We can all wait on the bread. Hospitality is one of few things that Grandmother Joy took seriously. Every time it was her turn to host the Nuckols homemaker’s club, our family laughed until we cried about her insistence on painting the fence, mowing the lawn, trimming shrubs, scrubbing her house from top to bottom, and beginning menu preparations weeks in advance. She even set the table sometimes a week before a dinner she was hosting, meticulously placing every plate and cup, then covering the entire setup with a table cloth until the day of the event. She knew that the way you treat guests speaks to your love and respect for them. Despite all of these preparations, I have never had a major meal at her house that didn’t involve a conspicuous 10-15 minute delay because she waited until everything else was ready to put rolls or biscuits in the oven. She intended for the bread to be piping hot for every meal, and that heat was worth the wait. I think there’s so much wisdom in waiting for the bread, and I think it is reflective of how she lived—she was independent, but she prioritized the care of others over almost everything. She aimed to please, but in a principled way. She believed in preparation, and she believed some things are worth waiting for.

7. Marriage and children are both wonderful and serious business. I smile often thinking about Grandmother Joy’s advice on creating a family. She talked about how marriage is fine, but you should be sure about the person because “that’s a hard knot to untie.” When I asked how you know whether you’ve found the right person, she told a story about a man and woman—both of whom she considered to be pretty odd--said that they just were perfect together and probably unloveable by anyone else, tossed her head back and laughed, and concluded with “so, you see, there’s a pot for every lid.” Grandmother Joy taught me that marriage is hard work, telling me she wouldn’t remarry after my Granddaddy died because “I don’t need another old man to take care of.” She told me a few times about a couple who divorced after having been married only 4 months, and she always said, “they didn’t even try to be married. I’ve been mad longer than 4 months.” I believed her. And she believed in building a family. Once, I told her I thought I probably wouldn’t ever have children. She put down her hand of cards, dropped the volume in her voice, and said with uncharacteristic seriousness, “you do what you want, but you will miss out on everything good in life if you aren’t a mother.”

8. Everything is temporary, so you can handle anything. I’ve never been an exceptionally patient person, and I always look forward to change. In school, I wanted a new teacher, a new semester, summer break, to go back to school. Any time I complained about something, Grandmother Joy would smile and say, “well, Beth Ann, it’s only for another 2 months—you could stand on your head for that long.” That phrase, “it’s only this amount of time—you could stand on your head that long,” helped me finish law school, prepare for my first oral argument, handle some challenging physical issues, and endure two difficult pregnancies –they’re only 9 months; I can stand on my head that long.

In some ways, I think we’ve been grieving the loss of Grandmother Joy for many years. In other ways, because of her generous, honest advice, I feel like her spirit is with me every day. I don’t quite know how to feel, how to appropriately honor her this morning. When I reflect on the way she lived and the things she told me, I think she would say that it doesn’t matter really—that today is just one moment in time, that we should do our best to enjoy it and each other, that we’d better make it as nice as we can, and that we should otherwise know that we can stand on our heads until tomorrow.

I am so lucky to have had Grandmother Joy with me for so many years, and I’m even luckier that she lives on with all of us. I hope that she rests peacefully knowing that she made such a difference in our lives, and I know that her spirit will continue to provide Joy for all the years to come.