Tag: love

For the wild range of emotions I felt towards my maternal grandmother (Jeanette) growing up, I never once doubted my love and affection for her. Sure, as a kid, she drove me nuts … and embarrassed me often (there was only one Jeanette and to know her was to love her – all of her! )but I never, ever questioned her love or devotion to her family.

It was particularly in the last few years of her life — my teenage years, when my Bubby and I traded hand-written letters and phone calls and I found the incredible packet of love letters that she and my grandfather had written to one another during WWII — where I came to see her as a woman and truly appreciated and understood her, for all her flaws and all her humanity.

In those last years, as colon cancer ravaged her body, I came to see her not just as my mom’s mom or my heavily-opinionated grandma … not just the Jewish snow-bird who lived in Boca Raton, Fla. who would smother you in her (ginormous) bosom the second she saw you or show your picture to anyone on an airplane within earshot and give you peanuts or plastic “Fly Delta” wings from the flight with the grandeur of giving you a Mercedes (as well as some other knick-knacks she picked up along the way) … but as a real woman, one I admired, respected and adored.

(“So you’re the Melissa that Jeanette here was telling me about,” we’d hear from fellow passengers at baggage claim at Newark airport).

My grandmother, raised in the Bronx by Russian and Polish immigrants who owned a candy store (hello, sweets are in my genes!), was the consummate 1950s housewife. She cooked, cleaned, cared for the family, kept a strictly kosher home. And she was beautiful.

When I look at pictures of her from before my grandfather died, it’s hard to see how she was the same woman. She was strong, graceful, glowing. No wonder my grandfather had fallen for her. Continue reading “Eat to Live or Live to Eat?” →