Grandma Henrika

Friday just past, I attended a workshop, Reconstructing Life Stories, to teach me how to conduct an eight-week guided autobiography for adults. I hoped to learn more about writing, always, but also to learn how to offer this opportunity to senior adults in my new community.

One of our exercises was to recall a grandparent. Although I am quite shy, I speak easily enough in groups, as though it is my mission to get others to talk by talking first. And I reveal easily in small groups of strangers (but not at all easily in one-on-ones).

Grandma Henrika Augusta Bjorndahl Watson was my lead-off story. She was my mother's mother, a Swedish immigrant, whose name I found on the Passenger Immigration Lists. When she was in Chicago, she heard a baby crying in the middle of the night in the distance and she knew to go to Pittsburgh. There, my grandfather, Ory Orville Watson, had lost his first wife to childbirth, but the baby was five months old. This baby, Aunt Martha, was the one Grandma heard crying.

Can you imagine that kind of risk-taking behavior? Grandma was a driven woman. Grandpa had two older children, Ruth and John, and shortly, he and Grandma, his housekeeper and nanny, were married. At the age of 42, Grandma gave birth to her first child, my mother, Esther Cecilia Henrika, and within two years, to her second, Dorcas Louisa Sophia.

All of these people are gone now. Their stories, some adventures, a few photographs (and even fewer labeled) live only in the memory of a very small number of us. We are all distant; none of us talk about the family with one another.

Grandma raised the children during the day while my Grandpa was a bookkeeper. At night, in Pittsburgh, they ran a storefront mission church. Bring in the homeless, feed them, preach to them, save them, send them on their way. Grandpa died when my mama was in her mid-twenties. Grandma lived on. She became a fanatical religious person according to my mother. My one significant memory of Grandma was the time she said she was going to take these matches and set herself on fire because there was no living left, no reason to live. A scary thing for an eight-year-old to witness, but what I know as an adult who reads and has learned a little about gerontology and aging, a clear depressed act, not unusual for an older woman with no apparent purpose. She spent some time in Pontiac State Hospital (now gone); my aunt Dorcas placed her in a nursing home.

Grandma died the night that the nursing home staff moved her room, mistakenly left a door unlocked, and did not realize Grandma wandered. She wandered out of the home (an old Victorian), down to the next home the James Oliver Curwood Castle in Owosso, fell down the concrete steps which led to the boat landing on the Shiawassee River, and cut her head. It's believed, although perhaps this was only for comfort, that she died instantly. Her body was found the next morning, hanging from a limb a little further downriver from the castle. She had drowned, if she had not died from the head injury first.

Today my Grandma is with me in the tatted lace she used to embellish the dress she made for my Tiny Tears doll and two pieces of homespun she created. Plus this memory of a woman who lived such an amazing life, and died so uselessly.