A Granddaughter's Tribute to 'Gran'

Editor's Note: Rosamond W. Baldwin died peacefully on February 14, 2006, shortly after she was brought to a local hospital from her New York apartment, where she had lived independently until the last day of her long life. She was just a couple weeks shy of her 97th birthday on March 1, 2006. The following is an updated granddaughter's tribute (originally written in 2011) to this beloved family matriarch.

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Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas, 1952

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By Susan B. Andrews

Kotzebue, Alaska

Originally written in December 2001, when Gran was 91, and now re-written after her passing at age 96.

KOTZEBUE, ALASKA-- The year was 1991. Rosamond W. Baldwin, known to all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren simply as "Gran," burrowed into a cream-colored mouton parka with a spectacularly arching wolf ruff.

Carefully settling into the middle of a dog sled, Gran readied herself for her first-ever ride by dog team across the white, frozen expanse of Kotzebue Sound-- 26 miles above the Arctic Circle of northwest Alaska.

Gran was just 82 then, when she ventured north by jet, all by herself, into Arctic Alaska from her postage-stamp efficiency apartment in Manhattan that she sometimes affectionately called "my cell."

Likewise nearly a decade later, immediately after celebrating her 90th birthday in New York with her family and friends, Gran jetted off on a trip to France. She also explored the world from her armchair along with her book-reading group that she still faithfully and eagerly attended after all those year. In fact, she routinely read thick books, cover to cover, such as a 500-page tome by Barbara Kingsolver called The Poisonwood Bible.

When Gran visited our growing family in Kotzebue in 1991, the mounts of brilliantly pure white snow, drifting up to local rooftops like delicately coiffed whipped cream, brought back her New England childhood, or the days before a steady stream of cars and trucks and their attendant sand, salt and other pollution dirtied up the snow and air in more recent times.

But Gran rarely waxed nostalgic. Typically, she charged ahead through the present and into the future, although snippets from the past did arrive at times around the subtle edges of her consciousness. One January in her early 90s, for example, after a particularly stunning snow storm that blanketed Manhattan, she wrote, "The snow reminds me of my school days when we listed for the five whistles to call off school!"

Gran was bilingual in English and French, for her mother, Marthe Guignon, emigrated from France in the late 1800s. Gran often signed letters, "Jet'embrasse," which is something akin to "hugs and kisses." She liked to poke fun at France's arch-enemy during World War II, the Germans, calling her winter hat "Mein Hutler," as "mein hut" means "my hat" in German.

Going out the door, off to, say, a play, a film or museum, Gran might have uttered a bit of Italian, too, saying "Avanti," which roughly means "onward." Even Latin could creep into her notes and letters, sprinkling them as she did with phrases such as "Tempus Fugit." No doubt at her advanced age Gran knew how time flies.

When she left us on the verge of turning 97, my grandmother had outlived all her siblings, all her in-laws, and virtually all of her contemporaries. She lived through two world wars. Even cherished friends and loved ones many years the younger had already passed on. In her last years she remained still strong of mind if becoming increasingly fragile of body, like the finely etched, delicate crystal one handles only with the utmost care.

But that steely grit and enduring strength that had protected my grandmother from the harsh and cruel realities of life's inevitable hardships continued to carry her through even the most freshly raw, horrifying events surrounding her, even close up.

"I never thought I'd live to see something like this," she said of the events that rocked her beloved New York, the nation and the world on Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet Gran's indomitable spirit ever complemented an enduring, innate optimism and unwavering belief in humanity, despite all that happened in the world in a lifetime that began in 1909, the same year Henry Ford introduced Model T, three years before the tragic sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and even a few more years before the outbreak of World War I.

Gran's lifetime witnessed, for example, the filming of Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty in 1922 on Ungava Peninsula in extreme northern Canada, where a traditional Native culture was recorded for posterity. Today, four of her own great-grandchildren today are growing up in a similar Native culture, which holds its elders in the highest esteem.

Gran remembered the first solo, non-stop transatlantic flight by Charles Lindbergh on May 20-21, 1927. When she was a preteen, flying to Europe was unheard of, much less taking the Concorde. Rather, she, along with family, boarded an ocean liner for her father's teaching sabbatical in France. I found it refreshing in this techno-stressed aged that my grandmother pretty much eschewed most gadgetry while remaining as informed and up on the real issues of the modern world as a wired 30-something.

Even before enduring the Great Depression, Gran understood that the richness and wealth of simple living, a way of life she continued unassumingly throughout life, her thrifty New England Yankee roots anchoring her against an America gone mad on corporate-driven consumerism.

Gran still corresponded in the most heartwarming way with bona fide, handwritten letters delivered by the U.S. Postal Service in an age of fax machines, computers, and the Internet.

Gran's style and grace and spirit-- really her essence-- emanated even on a mere "sticky note" dated just a few weeks past the September 11, 2001, that she had affixed to a newspaper clipping about the revival of a hilarious play called "Noises Off" that she and I had watched together many years ago in New York:

"Dear Susan-- Does this review strike a chord? You had a merry laugh at that matinee-- I remember... As you may guess it's 'chin up' here. Everyone well and busy. I hope all goes well chez vous. Every good wish for Thanksgiving holiday. Then soon hopes for a more enlightened 2002. Onward! With love-- Je t'embrasse."

Gran never failed to remember a birthday for any one of her considerable progeny. How many of us younger folk could claim to remember the birthdays of three children, eight grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren, in addition to other relatives and friends?

We're not talking slipping a simple card and check in the mail here. Gran devoted considerable thought to honor loved ones. She typically sent both a card and a present. For example, during the summer of 2001, our son Myles received a handsome, silky, Hawaiian-style shirt from Gran for his birthday. It arrived exactly on his June 4th birthday at Annisquam, Massachusetts, where we were visiting. That entailed his great-grandmother hopping on a New York City bus to get to a store, picking out the perfect gift, boxing it, wrapping it, and then getting herself to the post office in that massive city to mail it all on her own. At 92 years old.

Somehow Gran uncannily understood the tastes of a 12-year-old-boy. Indeed, throughout her life she always befriended young and old alike, including strangers.

She often kept a pet up until the final few years of her life, and she often would strike up conversations even in New York with complete strangers who, like her, walked their dogs in the Carl Schurz Park at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's home, just a couple blocks from her apartment.

Over the years, some of her beloved pets had included a basset hound, "Bascombe," with an infamous, booming, "woof, woof;" a black half-Springer Spaniel, "Angie," who never met a table scrap or a sofa she didn't like; and finally, the sheltie, "Sophie" of incontrovertible loyalty.

Gran always embraced her four-footed friends as part of her spiritual life. For instance, she made a point of attending the annual blessing of animals at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. If she could have traveled back to the 12th Century, surely Gran would have found her soul mate in St. Francis of Assisi, the patron of animals.

Somewhat of a mystic herself, Gran often noticed coincidences, of what New Agers call "synchronicities." For instance, I had written her with the news that Vista and Americorps volunteers were renting our Fairbanks cabin for the school year of 2000-2001. Gran soon wrote back, "Just an hour ago I was mentioning Vista and Americorps to a young lawyer re a court case involving an old walking friend. Life is mysterious!"

Gran also had a knack for spotting resemblances. In a photo of our daughter as a toddler, for example, she recognized glimpses of her own late brother, Wilder Smith, as a child.

Words like "enlightenment" and "deja vu" or phrases such as "life is a puzzlement" often entered Gran's vernacular, as she halfway admitted to believing in ESP. Often when I called her, she would mention how just minutes before she had been thinking of me.

Leaning just a smidgeon toward Christian Science or at least in matters of physical health, Gran avoided medicine when she could and even had been known to go to the trouble of splitting aspirin in half.

While the world's more serious illnesses and diseases escaped her, Gran nevertheless did not take others' suffering lightly despite her own blessed, stalwart constitution.

Indeed, my grandmother's own young life was fraught with sadness, especially the loss of her loved ones early in life to tuberculosis. Also, she became a widow in a man's world in 1955 and remained so for more than half a century until her death.

Gran understood the power of compassion, which might best explain her lifelong consideration of others.

She not only believed in public service, Gran also lived it, be that a long-time volunteer in New York city schools (until a schoolboy knocked into her, leaving her with a shattered hip in her late 70s) or a a one-time Vista worker of Maryland mental health hospital.

"The things that really count in life are health and love," she once told me.

I have shared Gran's wisdom with our two older children as they were just becoming mature enough to understand.

Thank you, Gran. We will always love you. May you rest in peace.