I know I’m supposed to be talking like a pirate today (Arrrrr…), but instead I wanted to touch on a topic inspired by the recent passing of prolific blogger and general rabble-rouser Bitch PhD’s Grandmother.
Dead Grandmother Syndrome is well-documented and frequently discussed in academic circles (that link right there is the second hit on Google for “college grandmother“). Invariably, whenever one is teaching a class, right before an exam or project deadline several students will appear in your office explaining that they need special dispensation because their Grandmother has passed away. One can almost imagine these legions of doting Grandmothers baking one last batch of cookies before keeling over in their aprons in a final display of grandmaternal support, sacrificing themselves to keep precious little Johnny from having to take his biology midterm with a hangover like the one he got from that bitchin’ kegger last night. Some particularly unfortunate Grandmothers have been known to die not once, but two or three different times during the course of a student’s college education! With such compelling evidence at hand, it’s almost difficult to believe that midterms and final exams haven’t been outlawed due to their detrimental effects on the health of the elderly. Is it any wonder, then, that faculty members often treat news of a Grandmother’s passing with something less than sorrowful empathy and overwhelming consideration?
Jean Davis Milam, my Grandmother on my Mother’s side, died on Monday, November 18th, 2002, five days before the start of Thanksgiving Break my third year at UIUC. Despite recent news that her cancer had metastasized to her brain and the obvious toll that the radiation and the chemo were taking on her 80-year-old body, no one in my family was prepared for her death. We had all assumed that she was getting better: what was the point of those lengthy doctors’ visits and the considerable discomfort she was enduring daily if she was not? Besides, people who died from cancer first underwent lengthy stays in hospitals or hospices: my Grandmother was at home, in the same room she and my Grandfather had been sharing for the past forty-odd years. We did not expect that she would eat a big dinner, wake up the following morning, cough blood, and die. It did not occur to us that she had lived a long, full life and was terribly, gravely ill: we were simply not ready for her to go and so we assumed that she would not.
I was moderately lucky in that I only had two appointments of any import that week: an abstract algebra midterm on Thursday, and a lab in my electronic circuits class on Friday. I emailed all my professors to let them know that I would have to miss class for the remainder of the week, handed in my homework assignments early, attempted to make arrangements with my lab TA to sit-in on an earlier lab but was waved off (“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Go home, do what you have to do, and we’ll take care of the lab when you get back.”), and went to my abstract algebra professor’s office hours to ask if I could take his midterm Tuesday instead of Thursday.
This was, mind you, one of my favorite professors. He was brilliant and challenging, personable and energetic. He had high standards for his students, and his classes were a joy to sit through. In fact, it was he who, only a few short weeks before, had suggested that I consider graduate studies in mathematics, and offered to write me a letter of recommendation unbidden. I was, therefore, completely nonplussed when he sighed, shook his head, and said “No.”
I could take the midterm on Thursday or take a zero, I was told. I opened my mouth to explain that my Mother was a wreck trying to plan the funeral all by herself, that my Grandfather was literally inconsolable and incapable of saying more than a few words before bursting into tears, that there were problems with getting the hospital to release the body and my family needed me and I needed them, but the words died unspoken in my mouth as my professor told me that I was the third student to visit him that day with such news. He was very sorry for my family’s loss, he explained, but he’d never get anything done if he tried to accommodate everyone and he suspected many students simply wanted to extend their vacation.
It was at that point that it dawned on me that it didn’t matter what I said or did: there was simply no way that I would be believed. No way to explain that I had lived with my Mother and her parents since I was a year old; no way to differentiate my Grandmother from the distant relatives depicted on sitcoms who were visited on holidays and then summarily ignored for the remainder of the year; no way to explain that I would not even be at this school if not for the money she had saved for my education; no way to put into words the feeling that I had lost my greatest advocate in all the world.
In the end, I did what my Grandmother would have wanted me to do. At a considerable expense, we postponed the funeral until the following Saturday. My Mother took care of the funeral arrangments by herself, consoled her Father as best she could, and, like a modern-day Ma Joad, kept the “fambly” together. I stayed for my test and aced it with a quiet fury underscored only by the vehemence with which I wrote out the sharp, angular slashes of my quotient groups. I kept it together during the day, spent long hours on the phone with my family in the evenings, got quietly drunk at night, and did not shed a single tear until I was home in Virginia and saw her watch laying on the dresser in her room.
Later, when I had students of my own for the first time, I tried to remember what I’d learned. The week before a particularly important project was due, in came one of my least-favorite students: a noisy, rude girl who frequently disrupted my lectures and acted as if she was the only student in my class. As I listened to her explain that her Grandmother had passed away and ask if she could have an extension on her project, I thought back to standing in front of my Grandmother’s silver casket and reading John Gillespie Magee, Jr.’s High Flight to the family that had assembled there, faltering in my recitation not just because of the blustery winds that threatened to blow the paper from my hands. I remembered how badly I wanted to slip the surly bonds of earth at that moment and fly away; how gladly I would have taken a hundred midterms if only I could be spared from having to steady my Grandfather as he walked from the car to the small row of chairs next to my Grandmother’s freshly dug grave.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Go home, do what you have to do, and we’ll take care of it when you get back.”
Often, in life, we find ourselves taken advantage of: our goodwill unrequited and our best intentions backfiring. Faculty are faculty because they love their subject: only rarely do they feel the same way about their students. Undergraduates, as anyone who has ever been one can attest, are indolent, avaricious, masters of deception and equivocation. Nevertheless, I still think it’s better to err on the side of compassion. “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Shakespeare wrote: “the valiant never taste of death but once.”
In the case of Grandmothers, once is enough.
