Grandma Audrey, We'll Miss You!

Audrey Ramsey

March 17, 1923 to February 29, 2016

We lost another good one, friends. This time it's my Grandma Audrey in Albuquerque. This past weekend, we travelled to New Mexico to pay our respects. At the memorial service, I gave a tribute in a couple of ways, both which I would like to share here even if they only scape the surface of what an amazing woman she was. First, a brief slide show and second, the text of a speech I gave.

Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers.

My Eulogy:

I recently read that the reason sunsets are impossible to capture on film is because a sunset isn't a moment, it isn't a something that is confined to 35mm or 256-bit color. A sunset is an experience. A sunset changes everything it touches: from the clouds overhead to the grass underfoot, from the brilliant burning on one horizon to the delicate twilight on the other. On top of that, it constantly shifts colors and shadows from second to second. 

Audrey Ramsey, my Grandma, was that too. She was an experience. One felt by every person in this room, and many, many beyond these walls. She cast her light on the world around her, changing those she came in contact with. And with how involved she was in my upbringing, I'm standing and staring straight into that light.  

So how do I give tribute to a woman so influential to me? I could go through the chronology of her life. I could list out dates and places. Tell you she was born in Dallas on March 17, 1923. That her mother died when she was 3 years old and she gained a stepmother a couple years later. That she had an older sister Rosemary who she talked with on occasion. That she died on Leap day, February 29th, this year. That she would've been 93 yesterday. And I will work in all those facts in as I can and as they're relevant and as I know them. But just giving you that is like describing a sunset as orange. 

The best way I can figure out how to describe my Grandma is to tell you how she colored my personality. How I see her in my own self -- how she touched my life -- and how she formed me -- and I hope that does a decent job to capture the experience that was Audrey Ramsey. 

One of the biggest traits that Grandma instilled in me is my work ethic. To say that she was a Type A personality entirely glosses over the subject. Even her "being lazy," was doing the daily crossword puzzle, answering Jeopardy, or reading an entire novel daily. I don't think the Kelly Girls -- a temp agency -- knew what they had when she started working for them in the 1960s. And Sandia Federal Savings and Loan may have had an inkling when she started as a teller a couple of years later. I can remember going to the bank as a kid and seeing my Grandma's desk just outside the vault and being so impressed by how much it was like being in Batman. Though I think what is truly impressive is the fact that here was a woman who started out as a temp and became a vice president of a bank -- one of the first women to hold that position in New Mexico and probably even the country. To this day, I try to make even my down time productive...though I do admit to occasionally watching a few guilty minutes of trash TV. Shoot, even Grandma liked the Hallmark channel now and then. 

I live in the melting pot that is San Francisco bay area and I don't think the transition from little New Mexico to one of the most diverse regions in the world would've been so seamless if it weren't for Grandma. Now, she wasn't a protestor in Berkeley or marching on the streets of 1960s Washington, but here's a woman that grew up in an exclusive section of Dallas and lived in East Texas and Louisiana in the 1950s, some of the most racial heated times in history...and some of her favorite people in the world were Ruth and Richard next door. And a woman who didn't flinch when my brother told her he was marrying the love of his life, David. She wasn't a flashy progressive -- she was a woman who simply progressed. To her, race and sexual orientation and whatever other thing defined a person was just that...one of many things that made a person who they were. I try to view the world the same. To put it in Grandma's banking terms, people are a sum, not a line item in the balance sheet. 

Grandma was structured. Very. Very structured. The night she passed away, my wife, Lisa, and I were in bed talking about her. "Part of me wants to go into our pantry and turn all of the can labels facing outward." I laughed when she added, "Another part of me wants to go to her house and turn all of hers backwards." Now, we gave Grandma a little bit of a hard time for being so...diligent...but in all honesty, I'm so thankful for it. From her, I learned the importance of a plan. Of taking care of my finances. Of keeping things in their place, so they're easily accessible. Going even deeper, Grandma created a framework from the chaos that comes from growing up. No matter how many people made fun of me in middle school, there was always a peanut butter and jelly snack waiting for me once I got off the bus. My brother Shaun and I looked forward to Fridays, even though they were often spelling quiz days, because we had Grandma's pancakes on Fridays. There's a reason that lighthouses are built on rocky shores and that they are the most critical when the storms are at the worst. 

Growing up, we rarely had gushy, Hallmark channel worthy conversations with Grandma. We hugged or kissed hellos and goodbyes as politeness dictated, but we didn't cuddle on the couch much. And that's okay. She showed me that love can be expressed in a million different ways beyond the gooey stuff on TV. Grandma's love was that she always there. To her Love was showing up (and staying around) for every single swim meet where my mom, my brother, or I competed. (Seriously, I don't think she missed one.) Love was carting a grandchild all over Albuquerque to boy scout meetings, plays, or a friend's house. Love was finding that person in your life, no matter how different they are from you, and sticking with them through all the wild ride of life. 

Little did I know, growing up with my Grandparents, how much their union defined how I view marriage. As we discussed, my Grandma was a planner and 'plan' was a four-letter word, in Grandpa's world. Talk about different. He was a man that won horses for my mom in poker games and told Grandma about it months later...at a company party...in front of her boss so she wouldn't get too upset. He was a man that called her up one day in the late 50s, right when they were packing to move to East Texas with a teenage Carol and 5 year old Denise, and told her, "We're moving to Alb-u-quirk." He was a man that...we'll, summarize it as a very different personality than my type-A Grandma. And they loved each other. Deeply. They shared passion for football and golf. They loved their family. They loved each other and made it work. I didn't know it until writing this, but my marriage has similarities. Lisa and I aren't as polar, but we share the same devotion to family, common interests, and deep commitment to making our marriage work as they did.

Thinking about my Grandparents' marriage brings me to Grandma's courage. It's hard to imagine what life was like back in the early 1940s. Grandma had just graduated from Highland Park High School (Go Fighting Scots!) and was attending Southern Methodist University when she met a football star, Ted Ramsey. The war was ripping the world apart and the two were married in 1942 at a small ceremony at Grandma's house just moments before he enlisted in the Navy. The following years saw them bouncing around the country just before Grandpa went to the south Pacific, leaving Grandma and an infant Carol alone for more than two years. Now that I have kids, I cannot fathom what it would feel like being completely cut off from my spouse for so long and for my spouse to be in such danger. When Grandpa died in 1992, she faced the next 24 years -- nearly to the day -- without him. She endured with poise and grace and a fair bit of bridge. That is bravery I'm not sure wound up in me, but I sure hope a fraction of it did.

Earlier, I made my Grandpa out to be a high-stakes card playing man as a polarity to Grandma. Now, that was misleading because while my Grandpa did win a horse here and there, Grandma threw down the coins on a near weekly basis. And by coins, I mean just that: her deep-pocketed games of Bridge where winning "high" gained someone maybe $5. After I moved to California, I would call Grandma every day or two and once we covered the weather in both locations, I would ask her about her card game. "Win the big money?" I'd ask. "Nah, my cards were lousy." she'd say or "I won the pot. A whole three dollars." Even as her health declined, she hung on to Bridge for a long as she possibly could -- finally having to bow out last Fall, "temporarily," she told me -- when she finally got too weak to make it to the Artichoke cafe. And here's a little secret, it wasn't the cards or the big money that made her love Bridge. She loved you, ladies, her card mates. Some of you were friends for forty or fifty years. Writing this section on Bridge actually makes me realize that Grandma and I have a lot of similarities in how we handle friendship.  We both value long-lasting friends. We may not have a million of them. The several that we do have endure. 

Another thing that I definitely picked up from Grandma is my love of reading. Seeing how she tore through books was simply amazing. In fact, someone should call the publishing industry, if we haven't already, to warn them that the readership for "historical family drama books set in England, Ireland, or the south" is going to plummet. Grandma consumed so many books in that vein, she may have single handedly supported that entire sub-genre. Seriously, I think on Mom's last trip to the library for Grandma, she checked out like 37 books. Now, Grandma and I did not agree on our tastes for books. No. no. no. In fact, anything on her "must read list" would safely be on my "never, ever read list." And vice-versa. That's not the point, though. I followed her lead and from 6th grade onward, I'm rarely seen more than 20 feet from my book. That passion for reading -- that escape into another time and place and a different person's head -- lead me to another of my passions: creative writing. And while Grandma never liked my fiction (it was best we never discussed it), she was a direct source for what got me into it and I can never, ever thank her enough for that. 

Finally, a strange, small thing that seems to have come from Grandma, though only when I talked with her, was my slight southern drawl. I never really knew about it until one day, shortly after Lisa and I started dating, that I hung up after a call with Grandma. Lisa immediately said, "You realize you just said, Buh-eye GRAND-maaaaawwww." And it's true, somehow I'd pick up her twang only while in conversation. I'm not exactly sure what this means, or if it's just a quirk, but it's definitely from Grandma. 

In the end, I think I'll miss those little things about Grandma a lot. The small interactions that added up and made my life so much more. I still find myself pulling out my phone every day or two for an update with her -- I now have to check a website to find out the ABQ weather, how the lobos did and I'll never know who wins the big Bridge pot. 

And so, like trying to describe a sunset, I could keep on going -- drawing more and more analogies and parallels in an attempt to capture an experience -- a woman -- that refuses to be captured. I'm sure that you experienced her in much different ways than what I've told you. Some facets of her personality that I failed to mention or didn't know about. Because no two sets of eyes will see the sunset in the same way. No two people will experience that beauty identically. And that fact makes the experience even more beautiful and even more of an experience. 

I'd like to thank God for allowing me to experience my Grandma for so many years. For letting me see her hold my own children and kiss the cheek of my wife. For teaching me to read with a passion, make my leisure be productive, and create structure to everything. For casting so much light into me on love and marriage and bravery and friendship.

A sunset ends. The colors shift to twilight and then to night, then to dawn and then back to day. The experience of a sunset lives long after it's gone. It's in our memories, our passions, our actions, and our imaginations. And my experience of Audrey Ramsey, my Grandma, will live there too. 

Thank you.