The Queen is Dead

At least she lived to see the solstice.

Once spring expired, so did my grandmother.

Two months past her 100th year, she died asleep at home surrounded by family. Peace be with her.

The old gray mare wasn't what she used to be. That's a song she used to sing that is also true of her.

Her hair must've been gray, but I can't swear to it. Grandma Dorsey always wore wigs.

Even when she no longer could order wigs from a mail-order catalog, my mother did it for her. Over the years the wigs got grayer, but never totally gray.

She did little more than sit regally in her lounging chair, but my grandmother always looked sharp. She looked not a day over 80.

We are not vain folks, just proud.

My grandmother always took off her eyeglasses when someone took her picture. As the wife of a photographer, now deceased, there were lots of pictures, some of her posed in swimsuits. She was a curvy beauty with a Miss America smile. But that's another story.

I was asleep when my mother called from Baltimore with the news I had expected. Just weeks ago, Grandma Dorsey went under hospice care. She was bed-ridden. The return to infancy was rapid.

For writers, writing can be cathartic. You write through the pain, usually on deadline.

But as I have other interests, my choices for distraction had increased.

I oil paint. I fence. I play the cello. I kickbox. I garden.

When my mother called, her nose clogged with memories, I didn't know what to do first: grab my knives and paint, parry phantoms, kick the heavy bag, pull weeds or awaken the household with a steady bowing of the D-string.

I fell back on the familiar. I embraced my pen like a security blanket.

"Writing gives you an excuse to do things," author Anne Lamott wrote. "Writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around."

I relate to what Lamott says in her book, "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life."

Writing of being first published in the second grade, Lamott said, "I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print.

It provides some sort of primal verification; you are in print; therefore you exist. Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled but stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal — a spiny blenny, for instance — from inside your tiny cave?"

Unlike musicians and athletes, she said writers find shelter in the craft. "There are many obvious advantages to this. You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away."

And they can't see your eyes well up or you rocking back and forth when the grandmother who helped raise you dies a peaceful death, but nonetheless slips away.

I have written several times of my grandmothers, lastly when Grandma Dorsey turned 100 in April.

At the time, she mostly giggled and hummed, especially hymns. She didn't know most of her caregivers, almost all of them her children. While my uncle played "Sweet Georgia Brown" on the piano, she sat patting her manicured right hand on her right arthritic knee.

At her birthday bash, when I left her room after acting the fool to make her laugh, she turned to my Pennsylvania cousins and said quite clearly, "Well, I guess Rhonda is gone now." This astonished everyone because she seldom spoke with any hint of recognition. We had a special bond.

You are in print, therefore you exist. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

Summer came and Catherine Eliza Brown Dorsey went away. Her travel is merciful. She never much cared for the heat. Catherine the Great is dead. Long live the queen!

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (lokeman@kcstar.com) is a columnist for the Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss Lokeman, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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