My paternal grandmother “Marnie” is 83 years old. Just a quick character sketch: she still dyes her hair jet black, she refuses to wear her dentures, she is quite liberal with the term “mother f**ker,” and she spends a good deal of her time playing the slots. These are the eccentricities that stand out most about her, the ones that hit you the way her cloud of overbearing perfume does when she wheels into the room on her “Go-go.” This is the caricature I have of her in my head. But when you strip away this idiosyncratic character, she is one of the strongest women I know.
Margaret Moosa was born and raised in New Orleans, the 11th of 12 children. Her father died when she was young and her mother was the matriarch of the Lebanese immigrant family. Her closest friend and younger sister Lucy inexplicably died in her early thirties. Many of her siblings met similarly tragic ends. She married my grandfather, a Naval officer, and over the years they had 3 children. When they weren’t moving from base to base they lived in the “crazy house” with her entire family. My grandpa was away on leave for months at a time, and when he came home he brought his alcoholism with him. He died in 1992.
Fiercely independent and insistent upon living on her own, she’s been battling stage four cancer for a few years now. Frankly, she’s kicked its ass. That’s not to say that she’s cancer free. She’s quite the opposite, really, but she’s been fighting tirelessly in her own obtuse way.
My clearest and most poignant memory of Marnie finds her sitting at my kitchen counter in the fall of 2005, a Hurricane Katrina refugee. Constant CNN coverage streamed on the TV in the background as Marnie talked to our relatives in Texas to get the status on her two 80-something-year-old brothers. They had finally made it to Houston after spending days in the New Orleans convention center without air conditioning or water. It was just Marnie and me alone in the kitchen, and I watched in silence as she pounded her fist on the countertop repeating a visceral “No, no, no.” Her autistic brother Rudy had been put on life support, and she didn’t want him surviving on machines. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her break.
She came to me later, privately, and, without reference to the incident in the kitchen, told me that sometimes we can’t cry. Sometimes we just have to be strong and keep going. She has a passion for giving directions, but she has never been clearer or more adamant with me than she was that day.
After she broke her hip on Sunday, she told her surgeon that she didn’t think she could go through another surgery and another recovery process. In response, her surgeon antagonistically asked her if she was a quitter.
“I’m not a quitter,” she said.
No, Marnie, you certainly are not.
I’m lucky to have lots of strong women in my life, but I’m luckier because she’s one of them.
-E
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