My grandmother, “Nanny” as my brother and I knew her, passed away late Wednesday night on December 4th at 83 years old. She’d been in poor health for a number of years, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it’s funny how you’re never as prepared for these losses as you think you are.

She was born in 1941, the daughter of an Irish immigrant. She loved woodworking and would spend hours making cute little decorations for people. We had countless little decorations that sat on our porch that she’d made, as did many of our friends and family. She made them for free because she enjoyed it. She had an old man and woman that she loved to make that she’d put on a little porch swing, she made wooden signs for folks to hand with their family name and the names of them and their kids, she made cute little frogs that sat on the porch and cute little wooden cars for us when we were little.

She also loved cooking, but I think it was less about the cooking and more about doing things for her family. She’d spend hours on Thanksgiving and Christmas in the kitchen making everything — mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, green bean casserole, stuffing, turkey, ham, greens, and so, so many desserts. Pumpkin pie, chocolate pie with meringue, a sort of pineapple upside down cake, chocolate no bake cookies. We always ate well when we did holidays at Nanny’s.

If there was one true passion she had, though, it was dancing. She danced all the time. Where I grew up, in a very small town in Arkansas, the “bigger cities” were still almost 2 hours away, and the movie theater only had 2 cinemas, so there wasn’t much to do besides hang out in the Walmart parking lot. That is, unless you liked going to country music dances. Between the Elk’s Lodge, the VFW, and a few other local organizations, there was always a dance happening somewhere. And Nanny loved to dance.

Nanny and my grandfather, “Papa”, were high school sweethearts. They got married in a barbershop on Main Street, and they proceeded to dance their way through life. And not figuratively. They were so good at dancing that they would frequently enter and win money in dance competitions all around the area. They were known by everyone of a certain generation for their dancing. They could waltz, two-step, jitterbug. You name it, they could do it. And they had an ear for music, especially Nanny, to pick out the rhythm of a song and identify what dance they could do to it, even if it wasn’t what you’d call conventional dancing music.

When my mom and dad were still married, my dad hated dancing and loathed going to the local Elk’s Lodge dances. Even when he went, he wouldn’t dance. But one day, someone — maybe my dad? — requested ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man.” Nanny didn’t know the song and asked my dad about it because she loved it. She said it was the perfect beat for jitterbugging. So from then on, she would always request “Sharp Dressed Man” when they went to the dance, and she and Papa would go out and cut a rug on the dance floor. (As Nanny got older, sometimes it was too long for her to jitterbug all the way through, so Papa would have my mom come out on the dance floor and finish the song out, so dancing runs in the family and just missed me somehow, I guess.)

In the south, especially among her generation, these dances weren’t necessarily “formal affairs,” but they were something you dressed up for. People wore their leather cowboy boots, their crisply ironed dark jeans, pearl-snap button down shirts, jackets with the fringe on the chest and arms, bollo ties, and big, wide cowboy hats. Nanny always said part of the reason she loved that song so much was because Papa was her sharp-dressed man.

Nanny and Papa did everything together. Nanny used to insist that they never left the house mad at each other because you never knew what might happen while they were gone. Of course, that wasn’t actually true, there were plenty of times they’d get into fights and Papa would leave to cool off, but they always apologized to each other, and they always forgave each other. They didn’t just love each other. They were, literally, best friends. They spent all of their time together unless Papa was at work. The only times they were really apart was when Papa would go to dear camp with my uncle and some friends and family, but he was also the only one that didn’t stay the whole time. Usually they were out at deer camp for a week, sometimes two, but Papa wouldn’t be able to last more than a few days before he’d make an excuse to come home because as much as he enjoyed the hunting and camping, he missed his best friend.

One of the last memories I have of us all together, my mom, my wife, Nanny, Papa, and I all went to a dance out at the local VFW. And we danced. I may not be a dancer on my own, but by golly if Nanny wanted to dance, I was going to dance. She taught me to two-step and waltz growing up, and while I’ve never been particularly good, I’d never turn a chance to dance with her down. It was always so fun.

Nanny’s health had been declining for more than a decade, but it wasn’t until Papa passed away in 2018 that we noticed how bad her health was, and it really only got worse from there. Nanny had Alzheimer’s, something that runs in the family and has loomed like a dark specter over my family for my whole life. My great grandmother lived just long enough that I remember my Nanny and my mom having to take care of her as she grew more confused (and occasionally more violent) until she finally passed. I remember visiting her in the hospital not long before she passed — she thought I was her grandson, not her great-grandson. It was sad, and scary, and it’s something we knew we’d have to deal with again.

We honestly didn’t expect Nanny to last all that long after Papa passed, but somehow she did. She just kept going. To a point, it was admirable. Nanny was the kindest, sweetest woman I knew, but she was also full of spit and vinegar when she needed to stand up for herself or her family, and I think she just couldn’t call it quits no matter how much she might have wanted to without her best friend.

While her last few years were what you might expect from someone suffering from dementia, we were lucky to have one last really great day with her. Her heart and breathing actually stopped one night, but my mom was able to resuscitate her. She was pretty weak, and when my mom helped her to bed, it wasn’t looking good. But when she came to check on her the next day, she was clearer than she’d been in literal years. She was still slow and weak, and she still had aphasia that made it hard for her to actually speak, but she was lucid. My wife and I came down to visit with her and we were lucky enough to catch her on that day. We were able to show her pictures of our house, of our dogs, of the work I’d been doing replacing the floor in the living room and how clean I’d gotten our fence with the pressure washer. Nothing stories, but also the mundane sort of stories I didn’t even realize I’d missed sharing until she was lucid again. She ate more than she’d eaten in weeks, packing away not just a every meal we sat in front of her, but a whole milk shake as well.

When she passed, I had the honor of speaking at her funeral, and I wanted to share some of what I said here as well. I’m also sharing the song I chose to play for her.

I wanted to share some memories of Nanny from mine and Brandon’s childhood, but I’ll admit that I struggled to come up with things at first. How do you boil someone who was such a large part of your life down to a handful of stories? It wasn’t that I didn’t have any memories. I had tons. But they didn’t necessarily make good stories. Saying “Nanny made us breakfast” doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the repetition. It’s not that she made us breakfast once. It’s that she was there over and over again, making us breakfast, taking care of us. But I finally settled on a few stories that I could share with you all to honor her memory today.

We took a lot of road trips as a family over the years. Some of those were vacations, but just as many if not more were Nanny and Papa helping us move or traveling with us to the doctor. And I only realized while talking with my mom and brother that most of those trips were before cell phones were really a thing. Nanny and Papa came up with a clever solution, though. They bought Walkie-Talkies so we could communicate across the cars — coordinating stops or letting each other know if we missed a turn or got separated by a red light or traffic. It always felt like we were a small convoy radioing to each other.

But the funniest part of these trips had to be watching Nanny and Papa’s car ahead of us. Papa always wore a trucker hat, and you could see which direction his head was turned based on where the bill was pointing. As we drove along, you could see Papa’s head turn one direction as something caught his eye or he looked at the scenery, only for their car to start slowly drifting into the other lane. You could tell when Nanny noticed because you could almost hear her from the other car as she swatted him on the shoulder and shouted, “Larry!” Sure enough, the car would quickly straighten back up…for a while. But eventually we’d see Papa’s head look in the other direction and the car would start to slowly drift onto the shoulder before another shout of “Larry!” and the car correcting itself. And that would repeat the whole drive.

Trips with Nanny and Papa were fun, but staying at Nanny’s house was always special. We spent a ton of time at her house throughout our childhoods, and it was always the best. For a while when Mom worked at Tyson, she’d have to get us up at 3AM and drop us off at Nanny’s so we could catch the bus. We also usually stayed there when we were too sick to go to school, and we stayed there during weekends over the summer because Nanny’s house was just cool and fun. It didn’t matter how early it was, Nanny would be there in her pink robe, ready to greet us with a smile and a laugh. She was always up before any of us to see Papa off to work, and for me, waking up to the sound of dishes clattering, pans sizzling, and the smell of bacon frying as Nanny hummed to herself was the sounds and smells of safety. Nanny’s house was the safest place in the world. 

When we stayed with her over the summers, she’d recruit us into helping clean the house, teach us how to cook, and give us tours of her garden and plants, teaching us the names of flowers and how to take care of them to make them thrive. But she was also always encouraging of our hobbies. I always fancied myself a writer, so Nanny gave me her electric typewriter. I had a computer that I would use, but there was something about the hard snap of the power switch, the hum of the engine powering up, and the clacking of the keys as I typed that made anything I wrote on it feel like Real Writing.

Brandon loved music, so she of course gave him free reign over the record player and her vinyl collection. Nanny loved to talk for hours about the history of different artists he took an interest in, adding in her own personal and family stories. She even had an old guitar wrapped in a sheet hanging in the back room that was her mom’s, and every now and then, she’d take it down and play it — she never took lessons, but she could play by ear, just like her mom. Even Brandon’s first record player was a gift from Nanny —  an old Sears suitcase record player from the 70’s. 

It’s fitting that Brandon would go on to get a master’s in Music History and I would go on to become an English teacher. We don’t do those things now because life is weird and doesn’t always go the way we expect, but to this day we both still love to read and we still love music, and we talk about those things together all the time.

The last thing I want to close on is Nanny and animals. She loved animals, but she always swore she didn’t want any pets. So of course, some of my favorite memories are of Nanny and her pets. She used to tell us stories of her pet skunk Corky, which she had before moving out of her parents house — she said they had the scent glands removed, so whenever it got mad, it’d bow up at them and try to spray them, but otherwise, she said it was just like having a regular cat. We also heard about Poncho and Chico, the miniature dachshund and chihuahua she had when my mom and uncle were kids. She’d alway insist that once these pets were gone, they were the last ones. And when Brandon and I were growing up, I guess that was technically true. She didn’t have pets. She had other people’s pets. 

Living outside of town like she did, folks let their dogs wander the countryside. And it never failed that a stray dog would find its way to her house, and she couldn’t help but feed them. Of course, if the dog hung around for a while, she couldn’t very well leave it without a place to sleep. And if it got cold and the dogs barked or whined in the night, she’d hear them and have to get up and cover them to make sure they were warm. Eventually, they became her dogs.

I remember Cupcake, the grey dapple great dane; Big Boy and Big Girl, the mastiffs; and Max, the white husky mix. Whenever she’d come outside, they would greet her with tails wagging, and as they rolled over on their backs for belly rubs, she’d laugh and say, “Look at you. You’re just a big baby, aren’t you?” Even after Papa passed, two cats that had been abandoned made their way over to her place, and of course she had to feed them and give them a place to sleep. See it wasn’t just us — even the animals knew Nanny’s house was special. Nanny’s house was safe.

Nanny, Papa, I love you and miss you both so much. I hope your jitterbugging the house down together again.