This is about my mother’s mother’s side of the family, so I guess it’s important to first start with my mother’s mother.  She was born Sarah May Brady, the sixth child of James Thomas Brady and his wife Annie Dougan.  She was born on April 14, 1901 in Fall River, Massachusetts.  She married my grandfather Robert Alexander Lamond on June 15, 1921, also in Fall River.  She had three children, of which my mother is the oldest, and she died on July 20, 1964 in East Providence, Rhode Island.  Those are the basics.

When I was a child, I remember her as an invalid.  But you could see the strength of will in her mind.  She used to hide money in her bureau, and when we visited, she’d always slip my sister and I a few dollars – the way I imagined others would be given cookies and candy from their grandmothers who weren’t invalids.  It was a way of saying “I love you – and this is just a little something from me to you.”  I called her Nana, because that’s what you called your mother’s mother.  You called her Nana.  So I did.

I say she was an invalid, but it wasn’t that she couldn’t walk or be up from bed – it was that she seemed to keep falling and getting hurt.  She was almost always sitting in her chair in the living room when we visited, with her cane over the arm.  She’d direct me on errands to the kitchen, or the back room while remaining seated.  Sometimes she’d use her cane and walk to the bureau in the bedroom, and show me the contents of her jewellery box or search for a few small bills, or show me a fine scarf wrapped in tissue.  And she always had the most fabulous hats!  They were always neatly kept in hatboxes in the closet, and the hatpins were in her jewellery box.

I remember that she was a smoker, though I don’t remember ever actually seeing her smoke.  But she must have, because that’s how she died, or so we were told.  We didn’t have a phone where I grew up – not for the longest time, and certainly not in 1964.  So, if someone just HAD to get in touch, they either called the landlord’s house to give us a message or, if it was very important, the police came to the door.  That evening a policeman showed up.  We left right away, and drove to my grandparents’ house.  I was supposed to stay in the car – but of course I didn’t.  I was shooed very firmly right back to the car by my dad.  We went back the next day, and I managed to get inside.  The house smelled terribly of smoke.  I went to the bedroom where she died while my parents were busy talking with my Grampa – and there was the imprint of her body in the linoleum where she had fallen on the floor.  The smell was sickeningly sweet, and I left the room as quickly as I could, wanting never to return.

They said she had been smoking in bed and fallen asleep.  The postman had seen smoke coming out of the air conditioner and called the fire department.  But whispered about in the family was a much more bizarre tale involving an open window near the bed.  And so I wondered – was it murder or an accident?  Then there was the matter of the phone call.  At the funeral her sister Ruthie told us of a call she’d gotten the day Sally (as Sarah was called) died.  There was no voice, but she could hear the crackling of flames in the background, and it frightened her.  She immediately thought of her sister Sally and called the police to have them check on her.  By the time the police arrived, the fire department was already there.  That phone call always bothered me.  Today there would be an investigation, but back then Nana’s death was attributed to her smoking in bed and the phone call was assumed to be a strange coincidence.  After all, there was no callerID back in those days – the call could have been a wrong number.  There was also no Last Call Return back then – you had to dial the full number – and Ruthie lived in Nova Scotia at the time.  It was a lot of numbers to dial.  But I still can’t help wondering… So many questions – I suppose it’s just easier to accept that she died after falling asleep while smoking in bed.  It’s probably also the truth.

© Deborah Ray and archivecookie.com, 2010.