Fond farewell to a remarkable woman

It is dusk and I find myself situated at a small table outdoors at the Cafe Anniversaire, the fancy Tokyo haunt I wrote about lovingly in Homage to the Coffee Shop: Part II. The atmosphere is lively, the air thick with conversation of well-heeled shoppers. Hair mussed, eyes bagged, worn rucksack tucked between my legs, I am direct from Narita airport and anomalous here on several accounts. Yet I could not resist the gravitational force of outstanding coffee. Burma is decidedly a tea country, and I have been anticipating this reunion with vice for some days now.

The past days in Burma were rich and profound. I will be processing and writing about the experience in the weeks to come. Today, however, my thoughts are directed towards the small town of Chenoa, Illinois. My grandmother Mary Ellen Morse, my father's mother and my last surviving grandparent, passed away in Chenoa on August 29 of heart failure at the ripe age of 93. Her body had long since started to throw in the towel, but her mind stayed sharp and her heart plugged along doggedly and persistently until the end. It was as if she ceded ground to arthritis and other ailments to concentrate her energy on heart and mind, the locusts of her essential qualitities -- intelligence, strength of will, and large heartedness.

Grandma spent her childhood on the family farm outside of Danvers, Illinois. She was among the eldest of the many Schertz children, and she carried throughout her life the sense of seriousness and responsibility that comes with the charge of helping raise one's younger siblings. After meeting my grandfather Howard Morse, a farmer and high school teacher, the couple moved to nearby Odell and settled at the Morse family farm where they raised pigs and milk cows, grew corn and soybeans, and tended a large garden.

My father was born the year Nazi Germany blitzed into Poland. Papa, my grandfather, wanted to enlist in the army, but he was rejected on account of being underweight (there is a serious Jack Spratt gene in the Morse family DNA). Committed to being part of the Allied effort in one way or another, the whole family left the farm for the duration of the war, heading west to the shipyards of California.

The family returned to Odell after the war, but not before my father had been infected by the allure of California. A dozen years later, he enrolled as an enginnering major at Stanford University and called Calironia home for the rest of his life. Grandma and Papa continued to work the farm together, the pigs and cattled falling by the wayside as the USDA encouraged farmers to plant 'fencerow to fencerow'. Grandma managed the books so ably that she and Papa helped put my sisters and me through college. Both Grandma and Papa embodied Depression era thrift to the bone, although through much arm twisting my parents convinced Grandma to join them for trips to England, Canada, and New Zealand while she was in her 80s. She was in no small part lured by the English style formal gardens in each of these locales. Grandma loved flowers almost as much as she loved bridge, which is a very strong statement.

When Papa died in 1982, Dad lobbied Grandma to move to the Bay Area to be closer to our family. She was not about to leave her home in Odell, but a compromise was struck and she spent winters with us in California. Arthritis eventually made these trips impossible, and by her mid-80s Grandma had moved to an assisted living home. My visits over the past decade have consisted primarily, almost exclusively, of card marathons (and I do mean marathons). We would play our first round at 9am or so, and by 5pm I would say that I had to get going for the evening. 'You're leaving already?' she would ask in disbelief. And then, 'Well, be sure you get here early in the morning.'

Grandma was not a chatterbox (Papa was the garrulous one), save on certain topics (cooking, weather, the Cubs) or with certain people (her younger sister Alice, with whom my grandmother could chat in perpetuity). After the first hour or so of gin rummy, our conversation would slow and then cease almost entirely. We were both OK with this. We simply enjoyed one another's company. On occasion, someplace I had been would intrigue her and she would slip question after question between rounds of rummy. Plum Village Monastery in France, for example, fascinated her. What are the monks like? What do they eat? Do you have to shave your head when you go there? Do they grow their own food? In large part to give Grandma a fuller picture of my experiences at the monastery, I wrote Recollections of Plum Village.

My last visit was in July, a three-day stint that saw some truly epic games of rummy. My sister Holly was there with my brother-in-law Jason and their kids Ryan and Kayla. The latter two sat in on a few rounds of hearts with their great-grandmother, and when it came time to leave we all kissed her on the cheek and said our goodbyes. Just over a month later, Grandma had three other visiters -- her nephew Mike, her niece Valerie, and Valerie's golden retriever Sophie. Val said Sophie and Grandma 'shared a moment', looking deeply into one another's eyes. Shortly thereafter, a lovely soul passed quietly and peacefully out of this world.