Chris Bickford

Elizabeth Whitehead Kelsey

September 28, 1914 – February 15, 2010

My grandmother passed away this afternoon at 5 PM Eastern Time.  It was a long time coming, and there have been many false alarms, but she kept holding on for a few more days, a few more weeks, of this sweet life that is so hard to let go of even when you are in such pain and can hardly see or talk.  The last time I saw her she told me I needed to get a girlfriend, then she got me to look at her Charles Lindbergh scrapbook when she made when she was 14, which I’ve seen about a hundred times.   I didn’t know, of course, that it would be the last time.  But that’s the way life takes you.

Nanny was always quick with a joke and a smile, even until the very end when she could barely make out a sentence, still the words that came out were full of twinkles of humor.  I remember, before her body started to fail her, how she had an old exercise bike set up by the telephone in her kitchen.  “When my friends call me, I like to see how many miles they talk”, she would quip.   She was always telling me I needed to “come back home”, and never failed to ask about whatever girl I was dating at the time, or the last one I’d been dating, I guess hoping against hope that one of her grandchildren might sire some offspring…When her mind started to go, she began to joke about having “Some-timers”  disease.   “You know Alzheimer’s disease?” she’d say.  “Well, I don’t have that, I’ve got “Some-timer’s” disease.   Sometimes my brain just stops working for a little bit…”

All of us in the family will always remember the many Thanksgiving dinners she prepared for us, pretty much by herself with a little kitchen help, for years and years.  We’ll remember her longtime boyfriend Tony who passed about 15 years ago, who would regale us with stories of the “mountain people” he met while hunting in the Appalachian mountains, until he would fall asleep in mid-sentence.   We’ll remember all her old scrapbooks and her old sing-songy Tidewater accent, and her old-school crushed ice machine that used to be the biggest thrill when we visited as young children, pouring the ice chunks into the machine and grinding it by hand, and having a real Coke with crushed ice like they served at the drugstore counter…We’ll remember mowing her gigantic two-acre lawn for ten or twenty dollars and thinking we were rich…we’ll remember tossing football outside her house on holidays, watching football games on her little TV after Thanksgiving dinner, and waiting for her to come over Christmas morning so we could open our presents.  In the summer she would take us down to her cabana that she had at the Officer’s Club in Virginia beach and we’d spend all day playing in the water, coming up to the cabana to refuel on ham sandwiches and coca-colas.

Nanny was in such robust health all her life, I used to joke people that she was going to live forever.   Well I guess forever ended today.   I’ve never really made up my mind about the afterlife, but I hope that wherever she is now, she is happy, and she knows that she was loved, and that her children and grandchildren thank her for the miraculous gift of life that she passed on to us.

Farewell Nanny.   We’ll miss you.