LOST AND FOUND

On February third of this year my maternal grandmother passed away. It sounds so dry and mundane, depressing, to say it that way.  It is redeemed somewhat by how her obituary read in the Cape Cod Times a few days following:

Nancy Burlingame went by many names since her birth on June 22, 1925. To her parents, growing up in Brookline, MA, she was Nancy “Did you skip school to go skiing again?” Eaton – convinced that rules and social norms made for a boring life. To her husbands, she was Mrs. Chopitea, Mrs. Burlingame, and Mrs. Rusk. Always a handful. Indomitable. An Ingrid Bergman lookalike. To her children, Viviannia “Bonny” Fleming, Aurora “Sandy” Curran, Blair Burlingame, and Brett Burlingame, she was Mom. Not one to give advice, she was someone we all learned from (such as that a solitary winter, however brutal, can be enjoyed with the company of a good, loyal dog because, at least all of the summer people are gone). To her 12 grandchildren, 8 great-grandchildren, and many friends and neighbors, she was Grinny. Dispenser of salty Tootsie Pops. Hoarder of blue sea glass. Greatest fan of Tom Brady. Avid beach walker and lover of animals. Seer of mermaid scales and exotic birds where others saw shells and rocks. She never passed up a good cocktail or a CC on the rocks. She was Apatumala! An active listener of tall tales and great dreams. Believer of any science that said dark chocolate was good for your health, Grinny succumbed to a heart attack on Friday, February 3, 2012 in Osterville at the age of 86. Grinny felt deep concern for our wounded soldiers and animals that have suffered. In lieu of flowers, donations to The Wounded Warrior Project or a gift to your favorite animal cause would be greatly appreciated. There will be a gathering in the back room at Wimpy’s from 3-6p.m. on Saturday, February 11, 2012. Grinny’s preferred dress code – jeans and sneakers.

            As anyone who has gone through this kind of loss knows, it is one of those times in your life when you inevitably ask yourself those cliché existential questions: what am I doing with my life, what am I leaving behind, what happens to us after death, will anyone remember? Don’t get too excited. I didn’t come up with any answers, either. Instead, I came up with more questions, more doubts and more fears.

That room at Wimpy’s filled up that night with a constant ebb and flow of people carrying paintings Grinny had made, pictures with her at all different ages, and so many fantastic stories. More than a few people came up and said they were there in representation of the such-and-such family from Vermont (Hey! Whadda ya know? Ya CAN get there from here!) or the Cape.  As I looked around the room that evening of her gathering, I felt a tremendous sense of loss. I felt not only the loss of Grinny - her awesome and lively soul - but of her Cape. The olde Cape Cod. I looked around and saw beautiful old faces of Lewises and Hinckleys and Crosbys and Farringtons – people who remember Cape Cod as it was for Grinny. People who recognized the little old building by the Oyster Harbors bridge in one of Grinny’s paintings as being the old oyster shanty. People who, like Grinny, insisted on keeping town ways to water open, even if that meant “trespassing” through newly landscaped posh properties with new owners who were trying to claim them as “private property”. People who knew to point out that she had been an Osterville Burlingame, not a Cotuit Burlingame. There’s a difference. People who can tell stories of having bonfires on Dowses and getting busted by the police officer whose greatest threat was that, if you didn’t get everything cleaned up by the time he came back around to check, he was telling your father. What happens when we lose that generation? Is that Cape Cod, their Cape Cod, no longer?

            I felt Grinny, her world and her times, slipping away from me and my heart sank.  I stopped the conversation I was having. I took a split second to step back. I took a deep breath and another look around the room.  I’m not sure what time it was or when it happened. But the tide had changed. I saw beautiful young faces now walking in and around the room – faces of Crockers and Peacocks and Averys and, yes, a splash of Burlingames. These faces mixed and mingled with the older ones, laughing and giving each other a hard time. These were the faces of the new generation who had heard all the stories of the olde Cape from their parents and grandparents and cherished them as much as anyone. If you know where to look, the olde Cape Cod is still there: kids getting into trouble, helping each other out, struggling to stay afloat all winter until the summer season comes again. Kids who say “frappe” and talk about “cookouts”, who know where to dig up steamers on the Neck and how to do a clambake the old way, with seaweed. These kids have taken the baton from that older generation and are running with it.

Hope rose to the surface from the dark depths, and I thought, well, that maybe Grinny was not as “gone” as I had despaired, either. Looking around at my family and our close friends, I thought maybe her soul, like her ashes, had scattered to the wind, a piece of her coming to each of us. Like my mother who says things sometimes that are so politically incorrect they make me cringe, but she retorts “I can’t help it, it’s genetic”; or my sister-in-law who now makes little surfer dudes and snowmen with a glue gun and rounded beach stones; or my aunt who is a chocolate addict (make that aunts. Plural.); or my uncle’s childhood friend who made a beautiful Christmas wreath out of mussel shells; or my brother who does occasionally enjoy a CC on the rocks; or my cousin who can’t help but unabashedly admire a handsome man walking by.

Maybe all those things I thought I was flying to the Cape to say goodbye to were actually not really gone at all – not Grinny, not the memory of her, not her good old days, and not her Cape Cod. I don’t remember which of us asked her one day, “Grinny, if you were to be reincarnated, what would you like to come back as?”. Without hesitation, her response was, “a seagull”. You might think that is a romantic notion: soaring above the ocean waters all day, resting your feet in the sand. No. That was not why Grinny wanted to come back as a seagull. No. She wanted to come back as a seagull so that, in her own words, she could “poop on everybody”. I will never walk the beach or look at a seagull the same way now. I will always wonder if it is Grinny and she is indeed coming to dive-bomb me. I will never trust a seagull again.  But I will always think of her.

            I thought I was flying up to Cape Cod that weekend to say goodbye to my grandmother. Then, I feared  I was not only losing her, but also the Cape Cod we had all grown up hearing about and loving. Last, I realized that what I thought was lost, was found.  And we carry on.