Local opinion: Reflections on a life as my grandma turns 104

As a home-care nurse kneeled to bandage a large wound on the back of my grandma’s leg while simultaneously talking to my dad on speaker phone, my grandma turned to me and said, “Don’t you hate it when they talk about you like you’re not here?” I laughed. She had a point. My grandma is fiercely independent and has been living in her single-story Catalina Vista home, alone, since 1993.

It’s a home she and my grandfather designed and built in 1962 so he could easily commute to the University. He taught botany and my grandparents’ house is festooned with “I heart algae” magnets and coasters with preserved specimens of brown, red and yellow seaweed.

Though my grandpa passed away in 1993, my grandma has stayed in their home where she still hosts an annual Christmas party. Last December she surprised us all by pushing around her Bloody Mary on the seat of her walker. Nothing can stop this woman’s can-do spirit.

When I ask her what it’s like to be 100+ years old, that optimistic nature dips down. She misses people. She’s older than everyone she knows and has outlived all her friends. She recently asked my dad to throw away a stack of obituaries she’d been saving. Some went back twenty years.

What’s remarkable about her life is the way she’s adapted. She was born in 1921 and grew up on a farm in Monticello, Indiana where her chores included doling out chicken feed and picking up eggs. She’d never set foot in Arizona before moving to Tucson. (As a PhD graduate, my grandfather applied to many research universities and got a single full-time offer at the University of Arizona. So they left Indiana and went West.) Once they arrived my grandma started gardening, learned to make Mexican food and set out bird feeders to attract the local pollinators.

As a homemaker she raised two sons, one daughter, and now has six grandkids and six great-grandkids. When I was little, she sewed dresses for her granddaughters, all three of them, and quilted blankets with patterns we’d picked out. Even after my grandfather died, she refused to slow down. She started playing tennis at age 45 and had season tickets to UA men’s basketball games for 48 years. She finally gave them up when the stairs to her assigned seats felt too steep to navigate.

When I asked her what job she’d want to have if she could go back and do it all over again, she said a sports coach, which surprised me. I never knew her love of sports ran that deep. But ESPN is on at her house 24/7 so I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised.

Her contemporaries from the Greatest Generation are notably more reserved than millennials like myself. She’s lived through dire conditions — the Great Depression, a World War, and a global pandemic that could easily have wiped her out if she’d been exposed. Because she’s not a woman who talks profusely about her feelings, it’s hard to get her to open up. When I do ask and receive life advice, it’s usually indirectly. She once told me, after we’d been talking about my grandpa, “sometimes you just want to turn to someone and say, ‘what did you think of that?’ You know?” I do. She’s outlived her peers, her siblings, her partner. She spends a lot of time alone. But she’s knitted together a fabric of support. My dad visits her each day, her nephew and his wife bring her homemade pizza on the weekend and her neighbors bring in her mail and take out her garbage now that she’s slowing down.

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from my grandmother, it’s this: Never take anything for granted. After my grandfather died, she said, “I thought we had more time.” They didn’t. But she did and still does. And she finds a way each day, after living through 26 presidencies, 5 wars, and 15 recessions, to keep going.