This is the third part of the story of my grandmother's passing. If you haven't read Part One and Part Two, you could do worse than to do that before you tackle this one. (I thought this was going to be the final installment but I have one more left in me after this…)
The funeral was set for Wednesday. Monday, as mentioned, my mother and I flew to Hartford and checked into a Holiday Inn a few blocks from the airport. On Tuesday, we had four stops to make…
Stop #1 was the office of the lawyer I'd engaged via phone to monitor my grandmother's affairs and, more importantly, to leverage her into the Assisted Living Facility where she happily spent the last years of her life. We discussed the disposition of her estate, which consisted of almost nothing, and handled the kind of paperwork that's necessary when someone leaves this world for good.
Stop #2 was the Assisted Living Facility. We collected some of her remaining belongings and designated others to be either thrown away or put to use elsewhere in the building. Two visits before, I'd bought my grandmother a very nice radio that she played every night. One of the nurses there told me of another guest there — a woman close to my grandmother's age and perhaps her best friend on the premises — who'd been asking about fifteen times a day, "What will become of her radio?"
"I think she'd really like it," the nurse told me. So I went to this woman's room with it, introduced myself and told her, "I think Grandma would have wanted you to have this." As I set it up for her, she told me, "Thank you so much. It will remind me of her every time I play it. I'll never forget…"
…and she meant to finish that sentence with my grandmother's name but couldn't come up with it. "I'm sorry," she said. "Please remind me."
I scattered some tip money amongst the staff and thanked them and then we moved on to Stop #3. Stop #3 was the church where the funeral would be conducted the next day. There were forms to fill out, papers to initial, decisions to make. A burial site had already been selected but we had to okay a tentative design and text for the headstone. It was at this moment that my mother learned that her birth father had not been her mother's first husband.
She'd thought her mother first married in 1920. It turned out there was an earlier marriage — in 1916. Or at least, that's what the church records said. The proposed draft of the headstone listed the first names of all three husbands and my mother decided to remove them all. It just seemed odd to her to have that name on there of someone she'd never heard of.
Then we met with the priest who'd be officiating at the funeral the next day — a serious, older gent who had a reaction when he learned that I was not Catholic and that my mother had strayed enough from the church to have married a Jewish man. I'm not sure how to describe his reaction. It was not overtly negative or critical…but it definitely was a reaction. The best I can do is to suggest you imagine a salesman who has devoted his life to selling Chryslers and he learns you buy only Cadillacs. He forces a smile and thinks to himself, "Another sale we should have had."
He asked all sorts of questions to gather material for his speech. He asked me all about my life and career, and he had another one of those hard-to-describe reactions when he learned I was in television and yet another when he learned I was unmarried with no desire to father children. I think he was straining to not say, "None of that would have befallen you if you were part of my church." After a few more questions, he had what he wanted from us and then it was on to Stop #4.
Stop #4 had nothing to do with my grandmother. My mother and I merely decided that we couldn't travel to Hartford and not visit my last remaining uncle, Uncle Seymour. Uncle Seymour was 94 — a very sweet, if slightly nervous man who from some angles looked exactly like my father, who'd died six years earlier. None of my other uncles looked that much alike but every so often during our visit, Uncle Seymour would turn a certain way and there would be my father…alive again for a moment. It shook me the first time but after that, I kind of enjoyed it.
Uncle Seymour was living, as my grandmother had, in an Assisted Living Facility. His was a little different from hers because his was a Jewish Assisted Living Facility. It was a lot like the non-Jewish Assisted Living Facility except that at the Jewish Assisted Living Facility, everyone was yelling at everyone else.
There was not only Yelling but there was Pre-Yelling and Post-Yelling. Pre-Yelling precedes the actual Yelling. It's when the person yelling yells something like, "Now, listen to what I'm gonna tell you! I'm gonna tell you now so pay attention!"
Then after the Pre-Yelling would come the Yelling, which would be followed by the Post-Yelling. Post-Yelling goes something like this: "All right, I've told you! Remember what I told you and don't make me tell you again!"
I heard a lot of that there…but not from Uncle Seymour. Uncle Seymour was delightful and happy to see us and we were glad to see him, even though all three of us knew it was probably the last time. (Which it was. He passed away two years later.)
My mother and I sat for about a half-hour with him in his little room. He kept talking about how proud he was of the two writers in his family — his son David and me. He had several shelves of large print books and on one, there was a copy of David's latest novel and a Groo graphic novel I'd worked on. Ours were the only two that weren't in large print format…but then I can't imagine Uncle Seymour reading (or understanding) Groo. The copy was just there so he could see my name on it. He talked a lot about how much he enjoyed seeing my name in the credits on TV.
That's one good thing about having an odd last name. If you're Bob Johnson, your name on a book or a screen doesn't uniquely indicate you and your relatives can't get too excited about seeing your shared surname on something. After all, they see it lots of places where it isn't you. But any time Uncle Seymour saw "Evanier" anyplace, he could swell with pride. He was almost certainly related to whichever Evanier it was.
By an amazing coincidence, my life abounds in coincidence. They just happen to me. As my mother told him about her mother, I picked up and idly paged through a large print TV Guide on a table next to me and I happened to notice something. An episode I'd written of Superman: The Animated Series was on that afternoon. In fact, it was on Channel 5 in about 45 minutes. When I told Uncle Seymour, he got way more excited than the news warranted. "Is your name going to be on it?" he said.
Come to think of it, he may have said, "Is our name going to be on it?" but either way, the answer was yes. "Is it going to be on at the beginning or the end?" he asked. I told him the beginning and I remembered how my father used to always ask the same two questions.
It started at 2 PM and it was about 1:10 as he excitedly got to his feet and began to lead us out of his room. My mother and I followed him out into the hall, down a large corridor, then this way and that way and this way again through the complex. He knew where he was taking us. He didn't seem sure how to get us there but he was going to get us there a.s.a.p. Via the longest-possible route I'm sure, we soon arrived at what I guess you'd call a Rec Room.
About thirty people over the age of 80 were sitting around, watching Days of Our Lives on a TV set. Uncle Seymour walked in, walked right up the set and changed the channel from 4 to 5.
For a moment there, I feared Uncle Seymour was not going to live to see 95. All the people watching the soap opera began yelling, "Seymour! What are you doing?" and "Hey, we were watching that!" Uncle Seymour gestured to me — so now it was my fault — and said, "This is my nephew from California! He wrote a TV show and his name's going to be on it and we all have to watch it!" Before Uncle Seymour and I could be caned to death, I hurried over and changed the TV back to Days of Our Lives.
"We have plenty of time before my show's on," I told Uncle Seymour as I steered him to a chair. My mother sat down just far enough away from us that she could deny being related to us in any way.
We all sat there watching Days of Our Lives for the next forty minutes. I had no idea what was going on but someone was leaving someone and some woman was losing her man to some other woman and everyone was wondering if someone else, or sometimes they themselves was pregnant.
Every time a scene looked about to be ending, Uncle Seymour would say, "We have to change the channel" and he'd start for the set. I would gently force him back into his chair and say, "We have plenty of time" and he'd say, "I don't want to miss your name." When the show went to commercial, he'd leap up and say "It's time!" and I'd guide him into sitting back down and I'd say something like, "We still have twenty-two minutes! It doesn't take twenty-two minutes to change the channel from 4 to 5."
As we sat there, I had a strong sense of "I wish I hadn't started this." The TV set did not have a very large screen and the average eyesight in the room was only above Quincy Magoo's because I was there. Most of those "watching" it were more listening to it…
…and I remembered how fast the credits flashed on that show: On and off in what seemed like an eighth of a second. It was more than that but not by much. During each commercial, Uncle Seymour would tell all his friends that they had to stay and see his nephew's name on TV. I think he was prepared to plant himself in the doorway — much like George Wallace trying to block racial integration — if anyone tried to leave. The difference was that Uncle Seymour would have succeeded.
Watching him…sitting there looking like my father from most angles, I was reminded how happy my father was when he saw my name on TV. He somehow had it in his head that a week my name was on TV was a week my career was thriving and I was making money, whereas a week he didn't see my name on the screen was a week when my income was zero. I explained to him over and over that I often was paid in April and the show aired in August but the concept somehow didn't take.
My pleasant little mental flashback was interrupted by Uncle Seymour asking, "Is it time yet to change the channel?"
"No," I'd tell him. "Seventeen more minutes."
Finally, credits rolled on Days of Our Lives. "Quick," Uncle Seymour shouted. "Change the channel!" As I changed it, he ordered everyone in the room to stay put.
A man about his age told him, "Seymour! I have to go take a leak!" Uncle Seymour said, "You can take a leak later. This is your one chance to see my nephew's name on TV."
The man said, "I'm incontinent!" Uncle Seymour said, "We all are. You got your diapers on? Just sit there!" I was thinking, "Well, at least they won't have to look at my name for very long." I got up and stood next to the set in a way that blocked no one's view. I said, "Now, I'm going to point to my name and show you where and when to look. It won't be on for very long."
I looked over and my mother was laughing her ass off.
The show started. Every time writing came on the screen, someone would ask, "Is that it? Is that your name?" and I'd say, "No, just keep watching. I'll show you where to look!"
Finally, the "Written by…: credit came on for a flash and I pointed and shouted, "There!" And a whole room of old people reacted like some nearly-extinct rare bird had swooped past the window and disappeared: "I saw it!" "Where was it?" "I think I saw it!" "Can you show it again?" "What did it say?" "I saw the first part!" "Was that it?" Quite a few asked, "Why do they make the writing go by so fast?"
Uncle Seymour got up and, beaming with pride, said, "That was my nephew's name." A few of his assembled facility-mates were impressed. Most slowly filtered out of the room. One elderly woman made a point of stopping to tell me, "I really enjoyed seeing your name, young man."
Another asked, "Will your name be on tomorrow?" When I told her no, she shook her head as if to say, "Too bad you can't hold a job" and she walked out. No one, including Uncle Seymour and my mother, had the slightest interest in actually watching the program…which neither surprised nor bothered me.
It was time for us to go. I just had to wait for my mother to stop laughing.
We said our goodbyes to Uncle Seymour and hugged him and lied to him. The lie was when we said we'd see him again. Every time I told my grandmother I'd see her again, I wondered if it was true but this time, I was fairly certain. And besides, if I had come back to visit Uncle Seymour, it would not have been to see him again. It would have been to see my father again. That was the last time I saw either one of them…and as we left the building, I could hear the people yelling.