The Life of Peggy
My grandmother holding my mother.
The Life of Peggy
Laura Dugan
I’m 22 years old. When I was born my grandmother was 62. Even after all of these years she still looks the same to me. Same hair, more white than gray, short and styled in a loose perm. A little thinner, maybe. But the same. Same build, stocky like me, broad shouldered and plump like all grandmothers are. A little thicker, maybe. But the same.
What’s not the same is the pace; everything is a little slower. She walks a little slower, thinks a little slower, remembers much slower, if at all. She doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. She’s just getting old. She’s 84 and still works, proudly she says, “Twelve hours a week,” at St. Nicholas Catholic Church. It’s where she wanted to get married 64 years ago.
“When I was younger, I used to plan my wedding. I wanted to get married in St. Nick’s parish and have all my sisters as bridesmaids, each wearing a different shade of orchid organza from light to dark. I ended up getting married in an Army chapel in Texas wearing a blue velvet suit.”
“The priest was from the University of Arizona and it was his first time doing a wedding.” Reverend Tuit was his name. “He just joined the service.”
“A week before I had my first child my husband was sent to Okinawa so he never saw her until she was 15 months old.” She says it almost as a matter of fact, as if it had been just another day in her life: went grocery shopping, bought some shoes, had a baby, didn’t see my husband for a year and a half. She was just 24 years old.
I ask my grandmother to tell me more. I am fascinated by what she’s been through.
She thinks, rolling through the events of her life. She says she doesn’t know why I’m interviewing her, doesn’t think her life is interesting. I say that it is. She lived through the Depression, she lost a child, lost a husband, raised four children on her own, went to work for the first time at 62. She looks thoughtful for a moment. “I guess you’re right.”
Now she’s into recounting her life, not wanting to miss an event. “And don’t forget, for my 80th birthday I went to Italy.” Except she says “It-lee,” missing the middle syllable. As do most Catholics, she views this as one of the highlights of her life.
One of eight children, she grew up in Wilkes-Barre, where she still lives today. She lives maybe a mile from her original home, 92 Park Avenue, where the family had lived for 49 years. She watched them build the South Street Bridge. 1926. “And I went to first grade over it.”
Her father was a stockbroker and the family were hit hard during the depression. “1929. We lost our home, we lost everything.” A glimmer of sadness appears in her eyes, a softness enters her voice. They moved to South Grant Street, across from Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) High School, the same school her grandchildren would later attend. She went to Catholic school for seven years. “I was editor of the school paper and the yearbook.”
She proudly tells of her education. “I went for a year to Wyoming Seminary Dean’s School of Business.” With wonderment she continues, “It seems funny now because it seems like it was $75 a year and my parents had to scrape so I could go. When I think back…” Here she pauses, clucking at the way things were. She wanted to be a journalist, but her family couldn’t afford to send her to college. Both my sister and I seem to have inherited the writing gene from my grandmother, for while our parents are avid readers, neither are writers.
For everything that has happened in my grandmother’s life, two events have had the biggest impact: the death of her husband and the death of her daughter. Every year since my grandfather’s death my grandmother has had a mass in his honor around the date of the crash. Aunt Maureen added, “she also has a little chest with the watch that dad was wearing on the night he died with the time stopped apparently when the crash occurred.” My grandmother also has mementos of her daughter – some clothes and dolls that she kept in a chest in the attic and would look at from time to time. According to my aunt, Gram still gets teary-eyed every year at Jean Ann’s birthday. Jean Ann died when she was five-years-old from a tonsillectomy. Her death was believed to be a result of malpractice – she hemorrhaged after surgery – but nothing was ever proven.
What seems to affect her most, however, is talk of her husband. Dead 40 years this July, she talks as if it just happened. This is where the sadness truly shows in her voice, and it brings tears to my eyes to hear her speak of him. It makes me want someone to love that much who loves me that much.
My Aunt Maureen, the oldest living child, shares, “What I remember most about my parents’ relationship is that they were so matched, like a hand in a glove.” My mother, Diane, agrees. “[My father] and my mother were wildly in love.” Maureen added “Mom never was the same after the death and I truly feel that a part of her died when he did.”
My grandmother never remarried, never even dated. When I ask her why she merely responds, “who would want to marry a single mother with four children?”
But I can’t help but think that someone would have. It makes me sad to see her alone. To think of her alone all those years. But even though she misses him, she has her life. Her job, her four children, her eight grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. Everybody in Wilkes-Barre knows her. When I was younger I used to tell my grandmother she should run for mayor because no matter where we went – church, Boscov’s, the grocery store – someone would come up exclaiming “Peggy!” with a smile on their face. I hope when I’m 84 people will think of me and smile. You can’t ask for a better legacy.
When her husband died, at age 45, in a plane accident that was nobody’s fault, Gram was left to care for her four children by herself. She was 44 and her four children – all girls – were 17, 13, 10, and 6.
My grandfather wasn’t the only one lost in the crash. The daughter of the pilot died as well. There were two survivors. My grandmother gets teary, her voice thick when she talks of the crash. How she found out about it on the news. How she knew something had happened to her husband when they announced one of the owners of the plane was Frank Panzarello. She was immediately driven to the hospital, told there were survivors, praying the entire way that one of them was her husband. But it wasn’t. My Aunt Maureen, when she found out her father had died, called their neighbor, Dr. Werhun, and asked him what to do. He called the hospital and instructed the emergency room to have sedatives ready for when my grandmother arrived. Her entire life she fought depression.
My mother remembers the night of her father’s death well. “It was a very hot and humid night and we were all home, my three sisters and mom. We were on the big front porch of the house on Northampton street. JoAnn [the youngest child] had gone into the house, came out and said that mommy was crying on the phone. Needless to say, we all ran inside and my mother was almost hysterical.
“After she left for the hospital, we put the radio on and at the midnight news they reported the plane crash, listing the survivors. When Dad’s name was not read we knew that he had died and shut the radio off.” My grandmother didn’t return from the hospital until around 3:00 am. My mother recalls “watching two men help my mother into the house as she was in total shock and grief. Dr. Werhun came over and gave her a sedative but I remember being up all night.”
My grandmother and grandfather, while he was alive, raised their children strictly. The kids didn’t have much freedom, especially after their father died. My Aunt Maureen said they were told “to not to cause problems and to behave because mom had suffered such a loss.” The death of my grandfather was a terrible loss, made worse by my grandmother’s depression. Not only did the children have to deal with losing their father, they had to cope with the fact that they had to tiptoe around their mother. While this has made some of the children bitter, my Aunt Maureen admits “Gram is strong and stubborn but her husband and family were her whole life.”
That same neighbor doctor who helped my grandmother after her husband’s death related a story to my grandmother that makes me dislike him even though I never met him. While going through a particularly bad bout of depression my grandfather had gone to the doctor and asked him if it was his flying that made my grandmother depressed. The doctor said that it wasn’t, and that was the truth – even my grandmother admits that it wasn’t. The doctor then told my grandmother that if he’d told my grandfather the flying was to blame, that the depression resulted from it, her husband never would have died in the crash. I’ll never understand why he told her this. Maybe it was an attempt to ease his own guilt – he was always very close with our family. Maybe he thought it would ease my grandmother’s pain. I feel it was a confidence that would have been better left unsaid. I don’t share this with my grandmother, I just watch her as she tries to regain her composure and my heart breaks. I quickly change the subject. More of this for another day.
After my grandfather’s death, Gram didn’t work at first, living off the money her husband had earned. Living off of the life insurance that he had luckily, eerily, just expanded. Fortunately, her parents were very supportive and offered help, but Gram was still left to learn a lot that she had never learned.
Driving, for instance, was something she’d never had to do. She asked her doctor if she could learn how to drive a year after my grandfather’s death and he said yes, but told her to not have anybody in her family teach her. She was 45 and she took lessons from a man who taught high school students. It so happened that the man who taught her to drive was, many years later, a patient of my aunt’s at Mercy Hospital where he died of an ulcer. Before he died, my Aunt Maureen asked him if it was my grandmother who had caused it. This story is a family favorite. My own mother, when asked what she remembered about my grandmother learning how to drive responded, “How she killed the driving instructor?”
My grandmother remembers learning to drive vividly. “When I passed the test, all of my kids were sitting on the porch waiting and he stuck his head out the window and said, ‘Your mother passed the test and on the first try.’” But driving wasn’t always easy. The family house was on a steep hill in a city prone to harsh winter weather. Gram recalls one incident in particular. “I started up the alley, which was like a hill, and I got stuck on ice and the AAA man had to come and pull me up the rest of the way.”
The hill and the house on Northampton provided many memories. Gram has always been very religious and on one occasion there was a heavy snowstorm and she insisted that her husband take her and the kids to mass. They got halfway down the street and they couldn’t go forward and couldn’t go backward. She laughs. “We all had to get out and walk home.”
The house itself used to be a funeral home and my mother and her older sister used to love to torment the younger two by telling them there were dead bodies buried in the back yard. They liked to stay up late and watch B movies like “Day of the Triffids.” My Aunt Marguerite, second youngest, found the movie several years ago and got a big laugh by sending it to my mother.
Gram walks with a cane now, although she still has the tendency to drape it over her arm as if it was a fashion statement and not a necessary addition to her daily routine. When she first started using the cane, she never used it correctly, was always leaving it behind, and still managed to get around. Now, however, things have gotten worse so her cane usage has gotten better. She moves slowly, at what seems a snail’s pace to the speedwalking gait of most young people. She has nerve problems in her legs, arthritis, bursitis, problems finding her center of gravity. She falls a lot. She scares the family. When visiting her, I found myself on edge. As we rode escalators, I found myself frazzled. If I got on first, I could be there in case she fell, but I wasn’t there to help her step onto the escalators. She got through it okay. It was a good day.
When she recently visited my sister, however, it wasn’t so good. She fell going into a movie theater and bruised her knee. She becomes like a toddler; you never know what to expect, you become afraid to take your eyes off her.
Of all of her problems, it’s her short-term memory that’s most affected. She can provide specific details about learning to drive or what it was like to live through the depression, but she can’t remember what she did two hours ago.
I first realized not that my grandmother was old but that she had aged this past Christmas. It was the first time that I walked into her apartment and I realized it smelled like old people. That cross between nursing homes and rancid milk. A musty smell that seems to live in the furniture that never used to be there.
My only sister, Elizabeth, had come home for Christmas and had joined the family on our venture up to Wilkes-Barre. She had bought my grandmother an automatic jar opener as a gift. My grandmother has terrible arthritis and the gift was both thoughtful and practical. Elizabeth spent a good 20 minutes setting up the jar opener and showing my grandmother how to use it. Gram oh’d and ah’d and was very excited. When we arrived at my aunt’s house a half an hour later and sat down for dinner, my sister asked my grandmother to tell my aunt what she had given her. Gram looked puzzled as she thought and began to tell another story when Liz interrupted and said she meant the jar opener. Gram looked like something clicked and she thanked my sister again. But the link wasn’t really there. She had forgotten.
On a visit to Florida to see my sister and my Aunt Marguerite, more signs appeared that Gram was not up to her usual stuff. My sister said Gram sat down and read the entire paper cover to cover. When she finished my sister asked her what her thoughts were about a certain article. Gram didn’t remember it. She took the paper and re-read the entire section, saying she must have missed it the first time through. Memory is rarely discussed. Repetition is tolerated; patience is hard to come by, but we nod and smile and go along with it. My grandmother is nothing if not independent and the fear of losing that independence overwhelms her.
She still lives alone in an apartment located adjacent to the South Street bridge she saw built and walked across on school days. Her living alone has become a big debate among her children. So far, she has been able to continue to live by herself, but with each passing day, concern grows for her welfare. Her mind, though not as sharp as it used to be, is far from gone. She does not have Alzheimer’s, just some short-term memory loss. She has someone that comes to help her clean, a service provided by Aunt Maureen and my mother. She has a special recliner that helps lift her up. She is fully functional, but the big question is for how long.
More and more responsibility has fallen on her children to help in her care. Most of the responsibility ends up falling on Maureen, with my mother helping as much as she can. Although my grandmother has four children, she is the closest with my mother and Maureen, due in large part to proximity. JoAnn lives in Georgia and Marguerite lives in Florida. My mother is in central Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half from my grandmother’s home. Only Maureen has stayed in Wilkes-Barre.
One of my earliest memories is of sitting with my grandmother on the porch of my parents’ house in Pennsylvania as she sang to me: “Animal crackers in my soup, lions and tigers loop-dee-loop.” It makes me feel warm and happy to think of that time and makes me proud to think of what my grandmother has gone through to get to where she is today.
It’s impossible to say how much longer my grandmother will live. She has her share of health problems, but for being 84, she looks pretty good – and things could be a lot worse. I have learned a lot from her, everything from children’s songs to the importance of family. When it’s her time to leave this earth, I will know that my grandmother loved me and that I loved her, and when it comes down to it, nothing else matters.
Originally written May 14, 2004. Posted in memory of Peggy, 4/16/1920-5/13/2020.