The Long Goodbye

I really don’t know when my grandmother forgot who I was—when those fiery eyes, once as crisp and clear as an autumn afternoon, finished their Alzheimer’s-fueled journey from omniscient to foggy to unnerving blankness. I don’t know because I never asked. I could never summon the strength to mouth the question that haunted me in those final years leading to her death: “Hi Gram, do you know who I am?”

My grandmother, Vivian (Davis) Lunt, was born churchmouse poor in 1915 and raised in a small house on a fish wharf in the island village of Frenchboro. As an adult, she ruled as the family matriarch and stood as an undeniable force in preserving the community traditions she loved while also pushing the island forward. She was blessed with a relentless energy, a sharp, inquisitive mind, and the strict discipline to get things done. During her ninety-three years, she helped start the island’s annual lobster festival, brought state ferry service to the island, and created the historical society and museum. She also wrote two island histories, led the church for decades, co-owned the family lobster business, was a self-taught artist and piano player. While my great-grandmother spent months dying of cancer at the age of 48, my grandmother cared for her needs in an era without electricity or running water. She learned how to inject morphine into her mother’s veins to temporarily ease the pain; toward the end searching atrophied arms for any spot not already pock-marked by the needles.

She was prim and proper and neat as a pin and kept her house the same way. My grandfather was a lobster fisherman and while he worked each day, she placed a towel, washcloth, and a pile of clean, folded clothes for him just outside the front door. He was not allowed in the main house until he walked around the back, stepped down into the windowless basement, and took a shower. To keep her kitchen clean, she covered her frypan and would step outside to flip a hamburger so no grease splattered on her stove. She was dynamic and always, always, moved with purpose. She could also be stern, sometimes looking at you with a set jaw and a death stare; you crossed her at your own peril. 

In November of 1936, she married an island fisherman, Sanford “Dick” Lunt, also an island leader, and moved into a two-bedroom house that was once a shed. It was there, in that tiny house, beside a cemetery filled with ancestors and mere yards from the home of her beloved sister Lillian, that she raised my father and lived for more than sixty years. The small house grew only a little during that time. Bigger wasn’t necessary and for Vivian Davis Lunt, necessary was nearly always more powerful than want—she held up thrift as her second religion. My grandfather earned all the money and my grandmother handled all the money. On her small desk was a stack of envelopes, all properly labeled—light bill, insurance bill, groceries—her way of monthly budgeting. Time moved along. Little changed.

And then my grandfather died.

Dick died of cancer in the fall of 1999. That final summer, he continued lobster fishing despite a failing body and colostomy bag. Each day that he ventured out to haul his traps my grandmother took short walks to a hillside clearing to check if his boat was safely back on its mooring. As soon as he died, my grandmother left their home, some bounce already gone from her step. She immediately seemed older and smaller and more frail. I remember the first time I glimpsed her future. It was a fall afternoon on the island and my daughters were sitting around the kitchen table at my parents’ house. My grandmother, for the most part, seemed fine, but she eventually leaned toward me and declared, “Well, now, isn’t it about time you settled down and started a family?”

In the years after I graduated from Syracuse University and worked at newspapers across New England and then again after September 11 when we all wondered what was happening to our world, I often thought the safest place I would ever know was my grandparents’ kitchen. In old coastal New England, the kitchen, just inside the front door was the official dining room, sitting room, meeting room, and living room rolled into one. Their kitchen was small, warm in the summer, stifling hot during winter. More than a half century of island history, people, and decisions passed through that kitchen. 

My grandmother would sit in her rocker, just under the black wall phone, look at me and say, “Sit a spell and tell me just what you’re up to.” Every vacation and every island visit I sat in that kitchen. If it were evening, my grandfather might wander in. The two of them would bicker a bit, he might hand me a piece of dried cod fish, maybe ask me to fill out some sweepstake entries he had saved, or bring a needle and ask me to dig a sea urchin spine out of his hand, but soon my grandmother had had enough and would usher him out. He would lay down on the twin bed in the hallway or “sun parlor” where he slept. If it was night, I could smell cold cream in the air, and could hear Lawrence Welk, Wheel of Fortune, or the Red Sox game on the television. It wasn’t so much that the kitchen was lost in time, it is just that nothing else seemed to matter there. I can still see it all: the Archie jelly jars she used for drinking glasses; the old gas stove where she burned many a meal; her “smock” shirts hanging on the door; the free insurance company calendar; the plastic table runner and the ceramic centerpiece; the ever-ready deck of cards; the varnished moulding. It never seemed to change. It was good. It was safe.

And then she left the island.

A month or so after my grandfather died, my grandmother left my parent’s house and moved into senior housing in Southwest Harbor, and, with familiar cues and surroundings gone, I watched more clearly the painful, slow ebbing of her mind. We talked in loops of conversation that repeated themselves in ever-shortening cycles. It was surreal. Her apartment always seemed sparse and lifeless. She seemed so out of place, although she never complained. Aunt Lillian, who lived just down the hall, just as she had lived just up the hill in Frenchboro, would whisper to me, “I don’t think she is doing well.”

She wasn’t. We disconnected the stove.

I’m not revealing any secrets saying that my grandmother was one of my biggest fans. And it is barely an exaggeration to say people who visited the Frenchboro Historical Society—where my grandmother and Aunt Lillian held court every day during the summer—left knowing nearly as much about my life as I did. She pushed me to get an education (“They can’t take that away from you!”) and although not an outwardly emotional woman, as a child she always held my hand—“stringing fingers”—in the sitting room while we watched Carol Burnett or some such television show. I got away with things few others could. I even wore shoes into her house and grabbed food straight from her refrigerator. That was big. She literally clipped every newspaper article and every sports story in which my name or photo appeared; she labeled each and kept them all in a manilla envelope. She pushed me to update her History of Frenchboro, which, when I did, became Hauling by Hand, the book that launched Islandport Press. The Davis wharf where she lived as a child served as the basis for the Islandport logo. Sure, when I was a child she yelled at me from across the harbor to “get off the church lawn,” no question she thought I could trend a little too “sassy” as a teenager, and maybe she shook her head at some of my adult decisions, but she didn’t say a word and there was little she didn’t think I could accomplish. 

And then she moved into a nursing home. 

Each visit grew more painful. The woman who walked the trails and roads of Frenchboro like a fiend, couldn’t walk. Eventually, they amputated part of her leg. The woman who played thousands and thousands of card games, couldn’t tell an ace from a king. For a while she still played rummy with Aunt Lillian, but Lillian played both hands. Soon she couldn’t talk. And eventually the woman who loved chocolate and cheese and good food, couldn’t feed herself. I watched as caregivers spoon fed her at the dining room table (For what purpose? I ask now). It was all so undignified.

The four walls in her bedroom sported a single picture, one of my grandfather working aboard his lobster boat. I always wondered if it still had any meaning, any glimmer of recognition, or if it meant no more than the generic scenes of granite shores and wharves hanging along nursing home hallways. I sometimes watched her sleep. She was so tiny by the end.

I brought my young daughters along a few times. I don’t know why, I guess I was hoping they might establish some connection, some lasting memory of their great-grandmother. Of course, that was pure fantasy. It is difficult when you realize that a person whose memory is so vivid, who helped shape you, will remain essentially unknown to your children. Just a name in some of Dad’s stories. My grandmother would have gotten a kick, as she might say, out of my youngest, watching the sheer exuberance, energy, and smile that is Eliza. “Oh, that Eliza is a piece of work,” she would say and laugh. Eliza would have walked into her house with shoes on and gotten away with things others could not. And she would have loved Emily, the daughter the health care workers said looked like her. Emily and my grandmother would have quietly played cribbage at the kitchen table. They would have munched on Nilla wafers and drank from Dixie cups filled with ginger ale. She would have touched Emily’s red hair and said “Oh, your hair is just beautiful. Red hair runs in the Davis family you know. Sit for a spell and tell me what you’re up to.”

And then, mercifully, she died.

One summer morning in 2009, on a Frenchboro hillside overlooking her beloved Lunt Harbor, we officially said goodbye. We committed her to island soil beside my grandfather to rest eternally in God’s grace. At painfully long last, a fitting end. It was quiet and dignified. We all sang “Amazing Grace” and rang the church bell and tried to forget her final decade or so. I remembered again her purposeful strides across the island trails, her laugh, her joy at burning brush, her carefully crafted Christmas trees, her delight at picking a mess of wild greens. I remember sitting in her kitchen playing cribbage. 

Of course, I will never know the moment when I finally faded from her memory. The day she finally looked at me and smiled, but had absolutely no idea who I was. I always told myself that I didn’t ask her because I didn’t want to embarrass a proud old woman; to sit in awkward silence waiting for a reply, knowingly hitting her another indignity in what seemed like an endless string of them. I now know better, and I suppose I always did, the real reason was more selfish—I just didn’t want to know.

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Dean L. Lunt is veteran journalist, author, and editor. He founded Islandport Press in 1999.