Eighty Christmas Eve's Ago: Baba's Eulogy

 

Eighty Christmas Eve’s ago, in the small town of Lužice, Czechoslovakia, a layer of thick snow had blanketed the frozen ground by nightfall. Among those gathered in the village church for Midnight Mass, was a 19-year-old farmer’s daughter and a 23-year-old former-resident-turned-American-soldier on a 2-week leave to visit his mother and sister. He was captivated with the chestnut-haired girl, the one with the winter-blue eyes and scarf wrapped tight around her chin, seated beside her in the pew.

In fairness, they’d met before. She remembered him as the neighborhood boy who’d once asked her for a “tiny bite” from the slice of bread smeared with lard that she held in her hand. She’d reluctantly agreed, only to have him steal half in one greedy chomp.

She’d been aware he’d gone to America to work as a carpenter’s apprentice with his father years before, but he was grown now—a man, standing proudly in uniform. He walked her home that night, snow falling down upon them, crunching underfoot like meringue, and she forgot all about her other beau. It would be two years of letter writing across the Atlantic before she would sail with dozens of other war brides to start a new life in America.

My grandfather died on Dec 19, 2001, and a few days later, my grandma (Baba) and I attended Midnight Mass down the street from their home in his honor. It didn’t snow that night, but I remember her singing Silent Night. I always loved her voice, but especially when she sang, the subtle lilt to it, the accent that persisted sixty years later, hinting at her origin story. She told me she’d been practicing to sing that very song—Tichá Noc (in Czech)—in the choir for Midnight Mass back in 1944, but a cold sore had left her unable to sing and so she was seated with rest of the congregation, beside Steve Novak, the solider.

But for a humble cold sore, I may not be here.

Yesterday evening, my family gathered for a memorial service for Baba, who died earlier this month. Beautiful, loving people from all corners of our family’s lives came to honor our 99-year-old matriarch. Many of them hadn’t seen her in years, given that her recent disabilities had left her homebound, but they all arrived with stories of remembrance and condolence to honor this inspiring woman.

Tonight, late on Christmas Eve, after families have gathered around dining room tables or congregated in bustling kitchens in the spirit of their own traditions, rituals, and pastimes, I have been listening to the silence of this night and remembering the sound of her voice hitting all the high notes.

Here is the eulogy I wrote in her honor.

***

There is nothing inherently tragic about the death of a 99-year-old matriarch. It follows the natural order of things. She was ready. Her death was merciful. Poetic even, to leave this world in the home that was hers and my grandfather’s for so many decades.

Marie Novak lived to see her great-grandchildren lose teeth, to marvel at their personalities as they unfurled, coming into their own like images on a Polaroid. She lived to see us tote around mini- computers in our pockets and marveled at videos we showed her of the kids playing the piano or catching a football, despite her never getting Wi-Fi. She lived to meet Maggie. She lived to watch Pride and Prejudice, all twelve adaptions, at least a hundred times and was always pleased when a Netflix DVD featuring Gregory Peck arrived in her mailbox.

She outlived my grandfather. Her siblings. Her son-in-law. Her nephew. The Queen of England and her 65-year-old stove. She never quite warmed to the new one unfortunately, despite it being the most rudimentary and old-fashioned model we could find. She witnessed it all. From the horrors of WWII to voting (twice) with such optimism for the 1st female President. 99 and ½ revolutions around the sun. Nearly a century. There’s nothing tragic about that kind of longevity. And yet, there is sadness. There is a realization—a reminder—that sorrow and celebration so often swim in the same pond.

Without her, the world is that much more diminished. The sadness for me lies in losing a kindred spirit, someone who knew my every freckle, fault, and fondness. The sadness lies in knowing that our lives never perfectly overlap with the ones we love.

When I was a child, Baba nourished me with bone broth and rhyming Czech songs. Later, she cheered from the sidelines whenever Amy or I struck out a batter from the pitcher’s mound and often, muttered her discontent with the umpires whenever a call didn’t go our way. When early on, Blake emerged as the grandchild with the most culinary aptitude, she taught him how to prepare goulash and her infamous Christmas stuffing—although each year, a new ingredient like saltines or mace seemed to surface.

She watched all three of us graduate from high school, then college, traveling to both California and New York, and years later, she cradled all four great-grandbabies in her arms. My daughters, my nephews, will remember her. What a rare gift that is. We only get so many people in our lives who love us unconditionally. And the vacancy she leaves behind is disorienting—a perplexing sort of optical illusion as we struggle to process the absence of a presence that had been so permanent.

And yet, as she lay in her hospice bed those last few weeks, she urged me not to be sad but to be happy that she would finally be at peace. After years of enduring crippling physical pain and the stripping away of her eyesight and hearing and all of the tasks she found tremendous fulfillment in—sewing, baking, even washing clothes—she would, at long last, be at rest.

Rest was not something that ever came naturally to my grandma. Her hands were always working. Never idling. They ground poppy seed filling for baked goods and pulled weeds in the garden. They threaded needles and crocheted papučky and mended holes in her great-grand babies’ lovies. Her hands cared for my grandfather in his final years and caressed our backs until we fell asleep when we were kids. They shooed deer away from her rose bushes and skinned beets on magenta-stained cutting boards. Her hands mastered the DVD remote (with the help of some very large print directional diagrams), and whipped eggs inside measuring cups before dribbling them in boiling broth to make homemade noodles. Her hands molded dough into tiny envelopes of precision and tightened layers of traditional Czech skirts around the waists of my sister and me before our Moravian dance performances. Baba was so adept at this task that one year, I fainted while singing Czech songs in a stifling, 87-degree nursing home, only to be revived with tepid ginger ale and a box of Fig Newtons. It was very on brand.

She never failed to want to know the price of things and took great pleasure in saving money and stretching a meal. She thought it abhorrent that I once gifted her department store gingerbread cookies for $12.99. The next time I returned, she’d not only eaten the cookies—after remarking that they really were quite dry—but she had repackaged her own homemade gingerbread inside the box—price tag on full display. 

Another time, she launched into effusive detail for nearly a half hour about what a delicious ham I’d brought her the week prior. I hadn’t really brought her a ham though. I’d delivered a bone my family had already picked the meat off of so she could make bean soup with it. And yet, she somehow extracted two pork dinners off that thing. When I admitted I’d purchased the ham at Whole Foods, she looked at me, nodding, as though this was mildly disappointing, then sighed, “Well, no wonder it was so good.”

In her last days, she commented on the smooth texture of the pudding I’d bought her. At this point chewing and swallowing had become difficult, and she was getting frustrated that death was still eluding her after a week in hospice.

“It’s high end,” I told her. “Some French company I found at Whole Foods.”

She rolled her eyes and asked, “How much was it?”

But before I could answer, she added, “Maybe you should drive me there and wheel me in to see the prices of everything because that might—just about—do me in.”

The woman was tough. My husband, who administered flu shots to both Baba and me over the years, will confirm that my grandmother, throughout her nineties, had far more arm muscle than I ever did. This was a woman who relished accomplishing tasks. Of being industrious and independent. She hardly ever complained, even when anyone could see the physical toll it took for her to simply rise to her feet.

Her talents were boundless. Her mind, sharp as a whip. She could make Spam taste delicious. Plants were reborn in her care. Her seamstress abilities rivaled those of Cinderella’s mice. Or, more accurately, the fairy godmother. She once transformed a much-too-petite bridesmaid dress to accommodate my swollen pregnant belly. She was an artist, even painting the Moravian patterns atop her kitchen cabinets and designing her own greeting cards.

She had a beautiful way of saying things—of stringing words together in the English language that sounded almost poetic. Recently, she recalled a memory from when I was a toddler, standing with her, holding hands in the swallow waters of Marco Island, shuffling our bare toes in the sand. “We were looking for shells,” she said. “I remember the glow of the sun that day. It was like silver on the water.”

Baba loved being outside. The simple pleasure of hanging laundry in the sunshine.

“It’s exercise for me,” she insisted in the summer of 2019. “They say it’s good for your mind too. To be outside. That’s why I’m here, alive, for so long.” Then she paused. “Maybe I really need to quit it.”

This past summer, she scrubbed the cuffs of her house coat and hung it out on the porch to dry, no longer able to venture down to the clothesline.

“It was a beautiful day,” she said. “Windy, but beautiful and I was tired, but so pleased I did it. I gave myself a pat on the shoulder. Your grandpa used to tell me to do that when I did a good job. I may’ve even deserved a Manhattan.”

In addition to a well-mixed Manhattan, Baba loved BBC romances, period pieces on channel 11, and Anne of Green Gables, the original. Apparently, the remake is lacking. She drank her coffee weak with a splash of half ‘n half, likely just to be frugal. She detested skim milk, comparing the stuff to blue water as though the liquid was so thin and diluted that you might actually see veins. She adored butter, especially on croissants already laden with it and the crusts of fresh bread. She stayed sharp watching Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and The Nightly News. She loved my grandfather, perhaps because he was known to defer to her and offer her the heels of that previously mentioned crusty bread. She loved to be right. And she usually was.

She was stubborn as all get out and astute until the end. You could not win an argument against her and she may’ve even been a touch clairvoyant. The summer before I attended college, my parents left me at home so they could drive my sister and brother to some out-of-state sport’s camp. I was newly graduated and had never done anything rebellious in my entire life, so naturally, I concluded it was as good a time as any to host a keg party. Baba and Grandpa dropped by unexpectedly that afternoon, and she took one look at the neatly arranged pillows in the basement before asking me point blank if I was throwing a party later. I was stunned speechless.

She knew me to my CORE. A couple of years ago, she asked me to adjust her trash cans so that they weren’t blocking the alley. When I returned from behind the garage, she was waiting by the side door as she always did to wave goodbye. Knowing what a germophobe I am, she asked if I wanted to come in and wash my hands, but I told her I’d used my feet to kick the cans back into place. She smiled and said, “Well, then you can wash the soles of your shoes when you get home.”

I was thinking about the last time she waved to me from that door. Over time it got too difficult for her, but for decades, she stood there, without fail, no matter how tired she was, waving from the porch as though she wanted to extract every last moment of our visit. The kids often rolled down the windows, blowing her kisses from their car seats. Every time I drove away, my heart split in two.

It's true that when my siblings and I were growing up, our grandparents were at our house so often that they insisted their station wagon could drive itself over, unaccompanied. I feel the same way about their house now. My car will never want to stop visiting. My mom and uncle’s adolescent footprints etched into the garage cement. Her hydrangea blooms as massive as cauliflower heads. The bin of rain water positioned just so under the gutter.

I will always expect to find her inside. Soup simmering on the stove. Whiffs of diluted Folgers coffee. But she will not be there. No “Dobry Den”. No television on volume 96. When I walk in now, I am greeted only with silence.

During the pandemic, I drafted a historical novel based upon my grandparent’s life and love story. I spent many hours at Baba’s kitchen table, recording our conversations about her life, coming of age in Czechoslovakia. And her memories of those early years were so precise, so vivid. The ice skates she’d slide on before venturing out on the frozen river. The weight of a bushel basket teeming with sour cherries. The smoke billowing from the wood stove that her mother lit every morning. She talked of picking plums in the orchards. Swimming in the town quarry. And doing gymnastics at the Sokol center after all her chores were done.

Her bravery fascinated me. How bold it was, after surviving the war to leave the only home she’d ever known to travel to America by boat, to follow a man after a two-week courtship and two years of writing letters. My grandfather. She didn’t ever regret the decision, but I understand that throughout her life, she often missed her homeland and those she left behind. After crossing the Atlantic at 21, she never again saw her mother. I know she often dreamed in her first language and toward the end of her life, she mumbled words in Czech, drifting in and out of sleep.  

In 1950, William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not EVEN past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

Since Baba’s passing, I like to think of her in the company of my grandpa—perhaps after subjecting him to a short scolding for leaving her down here for so many years. I hope she is patting herself on the shoulder for a job well done—a life well lived. I take comfort in knowing she was ready. That everything was said—all the love and memories, bobbing like apples on the surface between us.

 

There’s an image, a scene, I choose to conjure:

Light cast on vast, still water. The sound of a distant foghorn. And then, the mist fades, revealing a ship pulling onto shore.

On land, a figure straightens on the pier. A man. His gaze on the horizon. He has been waiting there, punctual, predictable, just as he did over seventy-eight years ago in the New York harbor to greet his war-bride-to-be.

The boat anchors, and a woman appears on deck. Their eyes meet and in that singular look, time eclipses. It harkens them back to a field of sunflowers, to a village church on Christmas Eve, and lard spread on rye. To a new house on 10^th Ave, to a daughter and a son in knit sweaters and knee socks, to bowling leagues, coffee clutches, carpenter union hats, stiff green Marshall Field’s boxes flung open under the Christmas tree, and a platter of jelly roll resting on Formica.

In that knowing look is the reflection of a single red poppy sprung from April mud, an Oldsmobile station wagon stocked with shiny quarters and honey cough drops and grandchildren scratching the foil off $1 lottery tickets. In that look, is a pair of webbed folding chairs positioned behind the chalked line
of a softball diamond. A yellow stack of National Geographics in the basement. Mango pits sucked dry over the kitchen sink. A toolbox. A sewing basket. A worn housecoat. The smell of Brut aftershave. Pussy Willows drying in a vase in the front room. A mason jar filled to the brim with dill pickles.

In that look is the milky newborn breath of grandchildren and the great-grandchildren he never got to meet.

They stand there for a beat, memorizing the moment, two omniscient storytellers, assured that the final words of their narratives have now been written, passed onto the next generation to tell and retell.

She disembarks from the ship, her belted dress ruffling in the breeze, a shy smile spilling from her lips. A soft exhale. He catches it as though it were a cottonwood seed. Grins back. Takes her elbow as they turn from the water, melding into the fog, trailing fragrant blooms of English lavender.

She is home, at last.