I got back tonight (1 am, really)
from a memorial service in Tennessee. Coming on the heels of my Mom-Mom
Craver’s funeral last weekend, it felt especially poignant in celebrating the
life of a woman who was my own grandmother overseas. Both women—Mom-Mom Craver
(Thelma) and Joan Britton—were more important to me than I can possibly say,
and with both, I’m still mourning the hole they’ve left behind them in my life
while celebrating the lives they led while they were alive. As late as it is,
and as exhausting as the last three weeks have been, I find that I have too
much on my mind about these two women to get to sleep quite yet. Few but my own siblings who knew and loved both women will probably understand and appreciate this post, but I find I cannot go to bed without writing out and thinking back over some of the ways these two women have made the world a better place.
Mom-Mom was my
Mom’s mom, my grandmother who came to Bonaire for each of us kids’ birth. She
went grocery shopping in her bathing suit and pushed me on my swing. She
listened to me as I learned to read and corrected my letters with red pen. She
scolded me for chewing with my mouth open and hugged and kissed me every time
she saw me.
The very first time
I saw Joan Britton, we had just moved to Slovakia. I was nine, and grieving the
loss of all my “family” of aunts, uncles, and friends from Bonaire. She and her
husband introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. “B,” but immediately followed
that up with an offer to call them Aunt Joan and Uncle Skip. At the time, I
remember feeling a bit resentful and not at all ready to call some strangers by
those beloved titles. It wasn’t long, however, before I started calling them
something else in my own head: Grandma B and Grandpa B. In what seemed like no
time at all, they had made themselves a niche in my heart and soon became dear
friends and confidantes. They were there for me during a very difficult
transition in country, culture, language, and friendships, meeting us to take
us to a new church and helping us learn the public transportation system in a
new city. They had us over to their flat, gave us good food, and spent
afternoons playing card games such as “golf” with five lonely children.
Mom-Mom invited
each one of us Hill kids over to her house every furlough for a special
sleepover, one at a time. On my turns, I would go to her house and watch in the
kitchen, later on helping out as I got older. We’d eat a good dinner together,
and she’d always make sure to have some flaky biscuits and her homemade
strawberry jelly waiting for me to munch on. After dinner and dishes, we’d sit
around and talk for awhile about anything—life on Bonaire, life in Slovakia,
how furlough was going, hurts and pains with siblings, laughter and jokes with
siblings, school, and more. Mom-Mom had one or two boys she kept an eye on and
teased me about every furlough, laughing when I’d blush and calling me “Mrs.
S------.” She made me feel important and directed the entire evening around
what I wanted. In a family of seven
rushing around in the busyness of churches and meetings, it meant a lot to be
singled out and have undivided and caring attention.
Grandma B did the
same: she saw a little girl struggling to understand what was going on around
her, struggling to live and love and make a new place for herself in a strange
world. I remember seeing my friends in my local village school with their
grandparents, and I remember following some of them around pretending they were
my grandparents. Family has always
been important to me, and while we’ve had aunts and uncles in every country
we’ve lived in, grandparents were another thing. I missed my grandparents,
wishing they could visit or even live nearby. The Brittons helped fill that
void, stepping in and love my siblings and me so thoroughly that we couldn’t
help but feel at home with them. On our second year in Slovakia, our families
moved into the same building—we had the upper two floors and a basement, while
they had an apartment on the main floor.
Christmases were a
beautiful thing— a blending of love from all of our grandparents. Mom-Mom and
Pop-pop would call us to talk to each one of us individually, despite the
extravagantly expensive phone costs they’d incur by calling overseas. We’d get
together all through the season to watch Christmas movies with the Brittons,
Grandpa B making fudge and popcorn and us Hill kids making Christmas cookies. Mom-mom
would send us our Christmas presents and the excitement would be full
throttle—my most memorable gift from them being a beautiful wood standing
jewelry box with a place for necklaces to hang and drawers for rings and earrings.
I still use it to this day, some ten plus years after I received it. Grandma B
would bring her knitting up to our home and knit as she talked or watched the
movie.
It was handcrafts
that served as another link between my natural grandmother and my heart
grandmother—Mom-Mom Craver crocheted and Grandma B knitted. Allison had taught
me to crochet as far back as when I was five and still on Bonaire, but somehow
nothing I made ever remotely resembled what it was supposed to. Likewise with
knitting, an American high school exchange student taught me what she knew, but
my knitting somehow looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book—completely to
my chagrin. I decided one year that I wanted to knit a hat for Stephen for
Christmas, but had no idea how to go about it. I approached Grandma B, and the
next thing I knew was I was invited down to their flat for some knitting time.
She had a bunch of yarn that I was able to choose from (which was beyond
exciting) and brought out a pattern book where I chose my hat style from. I can
still remember sitting on her living room couch, her on my right, with one
knitting needle nestled in my lap and the other perpendicular to it high in the
air. My stitches were slow and painstaking, and at first I didn’t have the eye to
see the differences that the varying stitches made. Every time I lost my place
in my pattern, I’d have to count all my stitches for that row and then resume
from there. It was Grandma B who periodically looked over my work and told me
that I’d made purl stitches where the stitches were supposed to be knit, or
knit stitches where I needed to purl them. She taught me the value of good
work—of undoing what you’ve done wrong to fix it so you don’t have an uglier
problem later on. A few times we had to undo so much work that I had to fight
down tears and discouragement, but each time she praised my work and
perseverance and set me to knitting aright again.
With Mom-mom my
interest came a year or two later. We were sitting together on her couch as I
watched cartoons and she crocheted. I remember watching her and admiring her
work out loud, saying how I wished I could do that. Without further ado, she
got up, announced we were going shopping, and took me to the store to buy $78
worth of pretty yarn. When we got back home, she showed me how many stitches to
cast on and then left me to my work while she went to the table and carefully
wrote out her pattern. As I finished each stage, she gave me instructions on
the next. Miraculously, my work was, for once, even. No unintended addition of
stitches, no dropped stitches. We frequently had to unravel and more than once
I felt ready to give up, but the prospect of embarking on my first real
crocheting project and making Mom-Mom proud outweighed any disappointment with how
slowly I was working. It took me several years of working away at my blanket,
but I finally finished it. It covers a single bed from floor to floor and
drapes over it beautifully. I’ve made blankets since then, spending a lot of
time and money making calluses from the yarn, but this is the one blanket I’ve
not been able to give away. I look at it and see a grandmother’s gift of love,
patience, knowledge, time, and money, while I made every stitch in the blanket,
it was her hands that guided me and her belief in me that kept me at it. She
gave me a pattern that is distinctly hers, and as I make each new blanket to
give to someone special to me, a part of her is woven into it, giving even
after she herself is gone.
To finish Stevie’s
hat in secret, Grandma B invited me to knit in her flat rather than risk
knitting in my home and him happening upon it. This was the start of a special
relationship with them where I fully felt not just one of the Hill kids, but
special in my own right and having a unique relationship with her. Coming down
and knitting on her couch when she was around soon became an invitation to come
down any time I wanted, whether or not they were there, and knit on the couch.
It wasn’t long before I became the go-to person for taking care of Grandpa B’s
African violets when they went on trips. I had my own little key to their
door—the only person that I knew of. Again, in a family of seven, it made a
huge difference to have an adult offer me a place where I could come and either
enjoy one-on-one time with a grown-up, or have some private space to myself in
an empty apartment. Some of my best thinking that year was done on their couch,
musing quietly to myself as I painstakingly knit each stitch. The sense of
accomplishment I felt when I finished
the hat was beyond anything I could remember feeling pride in before. This was
my first completed project that I was proud of. I’d made something with my own
hands and not only was it recognizable, it was cute. And yet it wasn’t just the
gift of knowledge and time that makes me recall this time so fondly—it was the
sense of self-worth I gained from it. The knowledge that adults besides just my
parents cared for me, and grown-ups who weren’t family who loved me as much as
if I were their family. It was the sense of pride in myself for being
responsible enough to take care of their plants. It was remembering my Mom’s
words that integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching—so
no matter how much I wanted to snoop around in their house, checking out what a
grown-up’s house was like and glorying in being the only one home, I very
carefully minded my own business and felt downright proud about my resistance
to curiosity! Even that little step of acting in their house when I was alone
as I would if they were there has come back to me since, reminding me of the
importance of trust, responsibility, and integrity.
On our special
nights at Mom-Mom and Pop-pop’s house, part of tradition was that I’d get to
pick out any movie I wanted to watch. Pop-pop used to tape TV movies a lot, and
they had what seemed like a huge collection of movies to choose from. Often I
fell back on an old favorite: The Chipmunk Adventure. Pop-pop would groan every
time I or one of my siblings would choose it (especially when we would choose
the same movie in succession as one after the other of us would spend our night
at their house and we’d all want to watch it), but he’d sit down and watch at
least the first part of it with Mom-Mom and I. Then he would go off to his room
and Mom-Mom, normally an early to bed person, would stay up “late” watching it
with me. She would frequently have pretzels and homemade ice cream on hand, and
sometimes even some homemade cherry cake made by my Aunt Debbie. Other times I
would ask Mom-Mom for a movie recommendation. It was at her suggestion that I
watched “Brigadoon,” “The Music Man,” “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” and so much
more. We’d snuggle together on the couch or lie on our bellies on the floor,
chins in our hands as we watched together. She never complained about my movie
choice, but always acted like it was the happiest thing in the world to be
watching a movie with me.
After the movie
finished, Mom-Mom would tuck me into bed in my favourite room of the house—the
blue room. Sometimes she would sleep next to me, sometimes I would have the
whole double bed to myself. Both were fun and novel experiences. Either way,
she would always be up before me in the morning and when I would finally get
up, she’d want to know what I wanted for breakfast. Every time, my choice was
the same: crepes. She’s sigh, smile, and get to work making them. I remember
one time that Allison and Heather spent the night with me and the three of us
chose her crepes for breakfast. Somehow as we were sitting around her table
waiting our turns for the next finished crepe, it became a bit of an unstated
contest. Allison ate… Heather ate…and I ate. And ate. And ate. Mom-Mom finished
one recipe of crepes and Heather and I were still hungry. She finished the
second recipe and I was still hungry. What did she do? She went back and mixed
up a third batch of crepe batter and made me more crepes yet. Mom-Mom’s crepes
weren’t for the faint of heart, either, but were perfect circles that hung over
the edges of our large plates on every side. At final count, Allison had three,
Heather had seven, and I had twenty-three crepes.
With both women, I
learned so much about right and wrong, how to love and be loved. I remember
wandering through the Christmas Market in Bratislava with Grandma B, listening
to local school children sing “White Christmas” from the stage. I remember
playing for hours in the woods behind Mom-Mom’s house, helping her as she would
walk out to her garden at the border of the yard and woods to take care of her
flowers. I remember learning Dutch Blitz with the Brittons with Allison and
Heather. I remember lying to Mom-Mom and her disappointment in me shaming me
and making me promise to myself I would never lie to her again. I remember the
night the Lesondaks got iced in after the Ivanka Christmas party and ended up
coming back to the house we shared with the Brittons. With the eight of them,
seven of us, two Brittons, plus several single missionaries staying with the
Lesondaks, we had all the space in our two apartments used up by bodies on
floors, couches, beds, and just about any other flat surface. The next morning
our families pooled resources and shared a breakfast over three floors. The
rest of the day we spent playing card games, making snowmen and throwing ice at
each other, and eating fudge.
I remember going
to the market with Mom-Mom to take my Uncle George’s produce. She would let me
pick out a book from her old covered up bookshelf—it’s how I got into the Hardy
Boys and Nancy Drew. I’d take my chosen book with me and we’d get into the
farm’s pick-up truck, loaded down with produce to sell at the auction. The
drive always seemed to take a long time, but I’d alternate between reading and
talking. I learned more about my family and heritage on these trips than at any
other one point, and loved hearing Mom-Mom tell me about life. Learning about
the market and auction was an experience in itself, and I remember feeling both
pride and embarrassment as Mom-Mom would proudly introduce me to everyone as
her granddaughter. It wasn’t a title I was used to be introduced as, and it
made me feel special and loved.
I remember biking
up and down Mom-Mom’s drive way and then going on bike rides with her down the
lane and back. I remember trying on my Mom’s old dresses and clothes that
Mom-Mom kept. Hearing stories of Mom’s dates and college life and imaging
myself quite grown up in the dresses was a favorite activity. I remember
coloring at Mom-Mom’s table and the drawing immediately going up on her fridge,
proudly displayed for any and all to see. She didn’t just hang it up,
though—she asked about it. Every detail, every piece of my drawing was
important to her.
I remember hearing all about the Brittons' kids and meeting them at different points throughout the years. I remember alternately feeling jealous that THEY were the Brittons' kids and excited to meet these people who obviously meant so much to Grandma and Grandpa B. I remember how easily they fit into our Christmas routines of movies, popcorn, and fudge, and how easy it was to see the bond shared between them.
I remember how
devastated I was when the Brittons retired and left Slovakia to move to some
state called Tennessee. I remember how, when I moved to the same state several
years later by myself, they drove an hour to Dayton to see me, take me out for
breakfast, meet and gill Andrew, and give us fudge. I remember them coming to
our wedding, and even their unexpected gift of a beautiful wood and metal
grille set.
I remember
Mom-Mom’s letters, phone calls, and packages as I moved to the states for
college. My first year I was so homesick for family and familiar culture, and
Mom-Mom wrote or called often, checking up with me and asking after what things
I might need. She sent me several boxes throughout the course of the year,
packing such necessities as shampoo right on down to luxuries like Kraft
macaroni and cheese. She even found out I had discovered jerky and send me some
Jack Link’s teriyaki jerky nuggets. Mmmmm! I remember how concerned she was
when I got pregnant with Hadassah and was so sick. Hearing her tell me about
getting pregnant with Mom immediately after their wedding and how sick she was was a bonding experience I never
expected to share with my grandmother, and yet was special in its own right. She
was always happy to see photos, and often I’d print out photos just to take
them to New Jersey and show her my life.
I remember sitting
at the Brittons’ table for hours, just talking and listen. I remember Bible
Study in their apartment a few times when ours wasn’t available. I remember going
to church with them, listening to Grandma B tell stories about her childhood
and Norway, and singing in our van all together on Sunday mornings. I remember
Grandma B joking about how she went from one country name to another when she
got married—Haaland (Holland) to Britton (Britain). I still have a very old
green suitcase that was hers once upon a time. She gave it to me when she left
Slovakia, and to this day I keep my knitting stored in it.
I wasn’t able to
be there for Grandma B’s passing, but I did get to see Mom-Mom Craver one last
time. We made a quick 24-hr jaunt up to New Jersey and back when she moved to
hospice care from the hospital, and I am beyond thankful we were able to get
there in time. Hadassah had met her great-grandmother several times, but when
we brought Meredith up before, Mom-Mom was in the hospital and children were
unable to enter. This time, however, with Mom-Mom settled in her hospital bed
in her so-familiar living room, Meredith met this woman I have loved my entire
life. She was fascinated, reaching down to pat Mom-Mom’s face gently. I had to
intervene when Meredith tried to hug and kiss her, though, as for Meredith,
that entails a gentle (or not so gentle) head bump. Saying goodbye before we
left was one of the hardest things I’ve done, and hearing Mom-Mom rasp out, “I
love you” as we left rent my heart. She died not even twenty-four hours later.
I don't feel quite ready to move on from mourning. The Bible talks about a time to mourn and a time to rejoice. I celebrate their lives, but for now, grief over what will never be a longing for what was overshadows the rejoicing. Yet in that grief, I know both women were believers and I can hold fast to seeing them again.
I remember how
both women made me feel loved, cherished, and belonging. Both took the time to
spend time with just me, to do things I liked and to listen to my heart. Both
women invested in my life in ways I am still realizing, teaching me little
lessons along the way and loving me no matter what. I’ve never lost someone
close to me before, and losing two grandmothers in such a short amount of time
has rocked my world. It’s reminded me again of how little time we have, but
what a difference we can make in that time. Even today, as I sat in Grandma B’s
memorial service, it struck me how, as much as she “did” a lot for our mission,
our church, and the families around her, it wasn’t all her “doing” that makes
her so sorely missed. It was her loving. The way she took time and gave it. The
way she poured her heart into those around her, not just giving acts of service
but truly giving of herself. Mom-Mom as well saw the “small” things she could
do that would make a big difference. Things that, to an adult, might not be a
big deal, but to a small child and teenager can make all the difference.
At the services for both grandmothers, I was struck by the unity and love present in those left behind. The bond created by those of us who loved each woman is unique, and shows how even in death, they make a difference--drawing together those who shared a love for them, those who were influenced by their lives. The time with my cousins last week was special and beautiful and left me with a renewed sense of wanting to keep in touch and not forget. The time today was cathartic in looking around and seeing so many people who shared my love for a woman who may or may not have been related to all of us, but changed our lives for the better. It also served as a reminder of how very, very important family is-- both blood family and heart family. Growing up between countries and cultures, roots are something I've had little of. Mom-Mom Craver was there throughout all of our furloughs, loving us and teaching us about who we are as Hills and Cravers and where we come from. Grandma B wasn't related to me by blood and didn't know me before I was nine, but she took me in nonetheless and loved me like her own, giving me roots in love and belonging that I desperately needed.
Both
women left behind examples I want to emulate—the importance of giving of
yourself and loving fully. The difference one adult can make in the life of a
child not their own. My life is far richer because of these two women who never
met, but influenced me in different and similar ways to be a better woman of
God and lover of people. I hope that because of them, I am able to make others’
lives richer.
