A Death at Christmas-time

My grandmother, Georgia Davenport McCain, died last Monday, December 9, 2013. She was 87 years old and was driving. She drifted off the road and into a tree. Her heart stopped two nights after the accident, but she came back, the stubborn woman, for five more days, to say goodbye to her children and grandchildren. […]

My grandmother, Georgia Davenport McCain, died last Monday, December 9, 2013. She was 87 years old and was driving. She drifted off the road and into a tree. Her heart stopped two nights after the accident, but she came back, the stubborn woman, for five more days, to say goodbye to her children and grandchildren. She told us she loved us but that they should let her go. She wanted to go to heaven.
I have put off writing for days, till the last possible minute, past the last possible minute (my apologies to my longsuffering editors). There was the last minute packing up of my house to do and the overnight flight to Atlanta and the nine-hour drive to Louisiana with my parents. The wake, the funeral. I have put off writing about my grandmother for so long, I think, because writing it means it is over. The funeral is behind us, she now lies under the earth, the tribute once published will then be in past tense. As I try to write, I think about all the questions I never asked her and wish I had before she slipped across the ocean that phones will not bridge.
My grandmother, whom we called Memaw, is not someone you feel right talking about in the past tense. She was a vibrant woman, full of laughter and full of words that spill over into her death. She grew up in one of America’s poorest states during America’s Great Depression, the economic crash of the 1920s and 30s, when, in her own words, they were “poor as Job’s turkey.” She writes in a letter to her sister Delia about how they would boil their cloths in an old black pot and heat up bathwater in the sun, which all the children would share. Her daddy would buy shoes “bigger than our foot so we could wear them longer. (Of course they usually wore out before we grew into them).” She was the sixth of 12 siblings, nine sisters, and three sons, two boys at the very end, and one in the middle, “Little Bill,” who died of pneumonia when he was two. Being in the middle of so many girls, she wrote about how she craved attention by showing off in the school yard. This longing for recognition and self-expression also came through in her writing. By the end of her life, she had authored ten books, four novels and six books of memoir and devotional meditations. One of her first memories of her talent being recognized was around Christmas time, when a 9th grade teacher surprised her by calling her in front of her class and announced that Georgia “has a gift for everyone in the class.” She writes in her book Walking with God for over 50 Years, that “I got out of my seat trembling and walked to the front.” Her teacher had made copies of one of her stories for the whole class.
 When she was nineteen, she married a young Navy sailor Carl McCain, also nineteen, just returned from World War II. She married him two months after meeting him. She would tell us how she had just gone shopping for her wedding dress when he saw her on the street and said “let’s just get married right now.” So, they went to a justice of the peace, and she married him with her wedding dress under her arm. The marriage lasted 62 years and gave them five sons and two daughters. Georgia and Carl could get “riled up” as they put it, but they both also had a sense of humour, and there was much laughter in the house. They both loved cooking, and they rivaled each other in certain dishes. There was Memaw’s chicken ‘n dumplings and gumbo and Papaw’s chicken n’ dumplings and gumbo, and then the foods each specialized in. He would cook meat, which he had sometimes hunted or raised himself, overnight in an old smoke house, and she would make sweets, coconut cake and peanut butter balls covered in chocolate, and pecan pies. For their 60th anniversary, my Aunt Donna helped them put together a recipe book of both of their favourite foods.
Their early careers also converged. She worked as a telephone operator before she married, and he later worked as a telephone repairman. In those days, operators would connect ingoing and outgoing calls, and she would laugh as she told us how sometimes she and the other operators would play pranks on neighbours, making a phone ring in two different houses, while the people picked up and quarreled over who had called whom.
This is how I remember her: laughing, full of pranks. Her sisters frequently visited and they would tease each other mercilessly. She passed her mischief on to her own children and grandchildren, who would slip toy snakes into her bed. She would pretend to be terrified. She had a writer’s moody temperament, and she could be somber, even stern, but her sense of humour always bubbled up underneath. She tells about a time when she was trying to spank her youngest son Barry. “He ran and jumped on the bottom bunk bed, knowing I couldn’t raise my switch very high or I would hit the other bunk. When I came after him, he started saying, ‘You’re sweet, Mamma. You’re sweet, Mamma.’ Who can whip a child telling you how sweet you are?” Even in the final five years of her life, as she mourned my grandfather, after he died in August 2008, my dad could still get a laugh out of her, as he reminded her over Skype to “drive like Mr. Haines,” the old man famous for causing go-slows wherever he went.
But she couldn’t or wouldn’t drive like Mr. Haines. She was too independent and had too many places to go. She would complain that no one ever came to see her, and yet at her wake to which over 600 people came, many told us they would stop by to see her and she would be gone, running around all over town in her car. She was well known in her church community and received letters from all over the world about her books. Within her little community of Rigolette, Louisiana, which the locals call “Row Gulley,” she was famous for her jellies, which she made from wild muscadine and mayhaw and blackberries she picked herself and for her pecan pies (again made from the nuts that she picked herself) that she would give out. She volunteered for years at the local nursing home, where Americans send their old, where she would lead Bible Studies and church services. She never claimed to be a “preacher,” but that is what she was, a pastor who led services in her little Wesleyan Methodist church for years and a woman who provided spiritual support to the old who lived in institutions, encouraging many more through her Christian books.
I wonder if she had a premonition that she would die in a car accident. She told us often that none of her sisters had lived past 87 and that she would go then too. She had several serious car accidents in her life, and her first novel Through Troubled Waters is structured around two car accidents and two Christmases. Dave has a car accident on his wedding day a week before Christmas, in which his beautiful young bride is killed. The accident makes him hate Christmas for years but introduces him to his second wife, the devout nurse Jennie. “Backsliding” into his old ways, he begins to treat her badly, refusing to let her continue her visitations around town, and ultimately abandoning her and their daughter. Another car accident brings him to his senses. The young couple faces another tragedy during Christmas season when their daughter falls deathly ill, but when they pray, the child gets better and is released from the hospital a few days before Christmas. This Christmas is a redemptive one, in which they celebrate both the life of their daughter and the new spiritual life Dave has found.
It is fitting, then, that my grandmother went home in her car at Christmas-time, to be with her husband again and her brother and seven sisters and one grandchild, my brother, who preceded her. Her family left behind mourns that she is no longer here on earth to take our phone calls or make us gumbo, but we also celebrate her life as a woman full of years, who has left behind her stories and her devotion and her laughter. She will continue her life on earth through her writing and through us, her seven children, 23 grandchildren, and six great grandchildren. We laughed and prayed a lot at her funeral, and we know that makes her glad.