mrissa | Joanne Beverly "Bev" Adams, 1932-2025

This is the eulogy I gave for my grandma today:

When I was eight years old, my grandpa told me, "Rissy, if there's anything your grandmother can't do, it's not worth doing." When I mentioned this to Grandma decades later, she said, "Really, he said that about me? Oh, that's nice." Long pause. "It's not what he said when he came home from work and found me taking a sledgehammer to the wall of the spare room, though." I think that over the years Grandpa learned that if Grandma thought she could do something, she probably could, and it was best just to get out of the way and let the magic happen.

My grandma was a hard worker, and you never knew what she'd turn up able to do next. Re-plumb a toilet? Sure, she'd done that. Fancy cake decorating? Did that too. Growing the fruit to make and can her own jams? Grandma was on it. Painting ceramics? A lot of people didn't realize her Santa Claus decorations were all Beverly originals.

Some people have Christmas and Easter grandmas. Some people have vacation grandmas. I had great holidays and vacations with my grandma, but I had an all-the-time grandma. I had a grandma who stood me up on a chair to stir the blueberry muffins when I wasn't big enough to reach them yet and showed me how to prune her beautiful roses when I was running through the nearby sprinkler. I had a grandma who was around to teach me how to pop the trap off a sink and how to shuffle a deck of cards.

And WOW could she play cards. She could play any game you put in front of her, and probably beat you at it. Not only was Grandma an incredibly smart card player, but she was improbably lucky. She would draw just the right cards, just the right Scrabble tiles--Grandpa called Scrabble "Beat the Hell Out of Richard" because of the number of times she thoroughly schooled him at it. But she didn't get mad if she didn't happen to win any particular game, for two reasons: first, because Grandma just didn't get mad that much. I spilled an entire glass of chocolate milk over her white pants when I was four, and the only problem we had was that the two of us couldn't stop laughing about it. And second, because games were mostly an excuse to spend time with people. To spend time with all of you.

Young or old, rich or poor, any race or religion or sexuality, Grandma could talk to anybody--and she did. Jesus would never have had to give my grandma a parable to tell her who was her neighbor, because she never met a neighbor she didn't want to make into a friend, and she never met a friend she didn't want to fold into the family. Just a partial list from when I was around--I know there's a lot more--she made friends on a train with a Finnish nurse, hugged a random British lady at a war memorial after sharing stories of their lost loved ones, and had a fascinating conversation on a Swedish ferry boat with a guy who was in a biker gang. Everyone in the world interested her, and she let them know it.

Grandma was a storyteller--me too, it's my actual job. That's not unrelated to having a grandma who was the family historian. She wanted me to have the names and dates right, but she also wanted me to know who people really were. She never confused Joe with David or Cathy with Cindy because even with fifty-five nieces and nephews, she knew them too well to do that, she knew their actual stories. I grew up not just being able to rattle off "Ardean Leona Don Thelma Vince Lois Harlan Bud Gale Donna Grandma Doris Dud," but to know that Uncle Harlan loved to sing and Aunt Leona was an absolute killer at the bowling alley.

At her eightieth birthday party, she wanted me to come meet all her friends--and what she really wanted was for me to have a special word for each one so that they'd know that she had been talking to her family about them. So that they would know that they were important to her. So I stood there with her for over an hour, saying things like, "Now, this is your friend who's from Philadelphia?" "You're the knitter, right?" "I hear I'm not supposed to mess with YOU at the bridge table!" Because Grandma had been talking to me about them, but more importantly she had spent my whole life teaching me to listen to the kind of tidbit that told you things about a person and made them feel like they were special to you. And she had spent my whole life doing it with my friends the other way around, so she taught me how it works.

My grandma lived a long, happy, accomplished life. But out of all she ever did, what she wanted most in the world was for you all to feel wanted. For every single one of you to know that you were special to her. In her obituary, we wrote that she would want us to list you all by name, but for Grandma that wouldn't be enough. She'd want me to tell a story about herself WITH every single one of you, every friend and every single family member, to tell the world how special you were to her.

I don't think she always saw that that made her the special one.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thistleingrey

Your grandma was a treasure. Understanding about being seen is one thing; having the skills to help people feel it is amazing.

mrissa

Thank you.

anne

I wish I could have known her.

I wish you could too, dear.

gwynnega

What a beautiful tribute about a very special person.

lisajulie

May her memory be a blessing.

tigerflower

May you be comforted and may you find ease and peace. I am very sure her memory will always be for a blessing. You do her proud.

umadoshi

She sounds truly marvelous, and this is a beautiful eulogy.

julian

I appreciate how you told this.

I'm glad you guys had each other for as long as you did. And: clearly, her memory is a blessing, and I hope it will continue to be in new ways, years from now.