The Journey of a Southern grandmother

First, I want to express my condolences to the loved ones of Rep. Mike Clampitt. Clampitt was a dedicated servant of his constituents and I wish his family comfort and strength as they grieve for his memory. 

My grandmother Anna Hutton was born in the green hills of Tennessee just on the eve of World War II. She died yesterday in Raleigh, North Carolina. Silvery late-winter sunlight was peering through the window, illuminating the clear-green buds of the Raleigh oak trees, and above her on the wall photos from three generations were pinned to a poster. She was 86. 

My maternal grandparents moved to North Carolina in the late 1960s. At the time, the state was rocking and heaving with the traumas of the Sixties. White people had gone virtually insane over school integration, and riots at UNC and Duke had caused Governor Bob Scott to call out the national guard. The entire state was on the verge of combusting. It was an inauspicious time to move to here. 

But they settled in a simple one-story house in a neighborhood in Vance County, surrounded by the hardwood trees familiar to the Piedmont and a surprisingly diverse group of neighbors. One family from Finland lived down the street, and a Jewish family lived a few doors over. My mother’s family managed to find stability in the maelstrom of the Long Sixties and settled, for a generation, in the Vance County woods. 

They bought a beach house in Surf City on Topsail Island in the Seventies. All three of Anna’s children enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill in the late Seventies and early Eighties and shifted the family’s basketball loyalties from the Wolfpack to the Tar Heels. When my first cousin came along, the beach house was an established gathering place for a brood set to blossom with the Millennial baby boom. I followed my cousin three years later and eventually came to relish, in my pre-adolescent way, the unique delicacy of the Mountain Dew Slushees on sale at the convenience store across the street. 

We never went to the Kokomo’s bar. 

In the mid-90s, by the time almost all my cousins had been born, my grandparents bought a house in Rolesville, in rural Wake County. Rolesville was one of the dozens of country crossroads that dotted tobacco country before Wake County began to modernize. A farmer still cultivated the Golden Leaf behind Grannie’s and Pops’s new house and the community had a pronounced rural feel. Now suburbia is encroaching, which I have mixed feelings about. 

Pops passed away in 2009. Grannie had spent the previous seven years tirelessly attending to his health, as he ailed and became a wheelchair user. It was our first death in the family and it took time for our grief to settle. For the next seventeen years, Grannie lived day-to-day helping her family and drinking her coffee, often over a political discussion with me. She was a Southern conservative, but her politics were more nuanced than my grandfather’s. She turned sharply against Trump when the dictator began fanning violence. 

Grannie lived for many, many years after her husband’s death, though they had been married for half a century. Her health declined after a stroke and she was admitted to memory care at a nursing home. After an ugly fall, her health waned rapidly, and she gradually lost the ability to communicate. Her body’s systems slipped away day by day, and the prognosis became obvious enough that family began to travel here from California. 

The end was too perfect for fiction. On the final morning, my cousin-in-law walked into Grannie’s room and turned on Spotify on his phone. Louis Armstrong began to sing, “Heaven, I’m in Heaven,” and Grannie left us, peacefully, for the next step on her journey