A Long Line of Iron (Part 2)

My grandparents bought their first house in St. Louis a few years after they emigrated from Hungary following the Communist Revolution in 1956. I was born in 1964, in New Jersey, where my parents had moved shortly after arriving in the United States. My father wanted to be near New York City, where the opportunities didn’t get any better or more plentiful. My mother had a hard time cutting the apron strings, but there was more to it than that. They divorced when I was 2, and my mother and I moved back to St. Louis to live with my grandparents. Through a sad turn of events, I would not see my dad again until just a few weeks before my mother’s suicide in July 1980. I was 15 years old and an only child. Though some by my own hand, the years ahead would bring more sorrow and adversity than I had yet known in my thus-far short life.

My father wanted to re-insert himself into my life, and I would have none of it. Things were not easy, and I clung to the familiar – my home, school, friends, activities. Thankfully he did not force me to move to New Jersey to live with him.

I continued to live with my grandmother where the generational and cultural gap between us rivaled the Grand Canyon. Every day was fraught with arguments that often dissolved into outright screaming matches. She was the picture of “tough love” – rarely did words of encouragement flow from her lips but she was generous with putdowns that were meant to shake some sense into me. It wasn’t until much later that I would realize what she herself had been through growing up, and what a terrible weight it must’ve been for her -- at 70 years of age -- to raise an angry, strong-willed, rebellious teenager – alone -- in a country where she didn’t speak the language, didn’t have much money, and had just suffered the loss of her only child. We were both devastated by my mother’s death but we carried on nonetheless, despite our differences.

It made me crazy that she would make a statement that could be incredibly wrong and she would absolutely insist what she said was right. Once we went shopping for a new car for her and apparently she had browsed the lot a few days earlier. The car she had looked at was within her budget but the one she insisted she had looked at was not the same model – and clearly not within her budget. We argued about it (while the salesman was completely entertained by two women catfighting in Hungarian), and neither of us budged, both of us sure about being right. We went home with nothing accomplished -- me seething with accumulated anger, and her muttering something about how disrespectful children can be.

We had a washing machine but no dryer. She would gather up my laundry despite me insisting I could do it myself. She would soak my socks in near-undiluted bleach (after all they were white and MORE is better!), then throw them into the wash. We had no dryer, so she would hang them up outside in the hot sun to dry. When I put on a pair that had been through this cycle my thumbs went right through the sides, they were utterly disintegrated from the bleaching and sun drying.

Nicer shirts I owned suffered a similar fate – inevitably they would end up with frayed edges or mystery spots, where most likely they had shared residence with the bleach-drenched socks. If our washer had a “Stun the Stain Out!” setting, I’m sure she was perpetually dialed into it.

My indignation-outrage-whining (in that order) was to no avail. She plowed right ahead, single-mindedly undeterred in her daily endeavors. She was over the top on EVERYTHING.

She also did things that amazed me, though at the time I thought they were plain stupid: she drove a car despite not being able to read English (though she “talked” her way out of countless traffic tickets), shopped for her own groceries (she could read numbers), cut the grass, grew beautiful flowers that were the envy of the neighborhood, cultivated a thriving vegetable garden, handmade her own phyllo dough (the paper-thin pastry used in baklava), assembled ginormous care packages for relatives still in Hungary and hauled them to the Post Office, painted our frame garage, tuckpointed the bricks on our house, and masoned the stones in our basement to minimize flooding from heavy rains – all in her 70s and on into her 80s.

At 74, she was diagnosed with rectal cancer and had the tumors removed. After radiation treatments, she was pronounced cancer-free but she would have a permanent colostomy (rerouting the lower intestine and its “output” through a surgically created hole in the lower abdomen and into an ostomy pouch) for the rest of her life. She recovered from major surgery in less than 3 weeks and within a month was oriented to her new personal care routine. Anyone else would’ve taken twice as long, or longer, to recover and get on their feet again.

She was the unstoppable freight train that had long ago left the station – God was the only Conductor who could put the brakes on now.

It seemed only fitting that she gave me away at my wedding in 1993. I realized that somewhere along the line the tables had turned and I was now her caregiver, where earlier in my life she had been mine. I wondered if she ever regretted taking me in; at times I’m sure we mutually wished Very Bad Things on each other, but to this day I am still realizing how much of my strength has come from her countless examples of undaunted perseverance.

When she passed away in 2001, she was only 7 days shy of her 90th birthday. In a span of 18 months, she had deteriorated significantly both in her physical and mental faculties, losing over half her body weight as well as her speech. After nearly 40 years of having an ever-present column of iron in my life, I had “assumed” she would live forever. In fact the inside family joke was that she would outlive me. Watching her decline was exceedingly painful, both from a compassion standpoint as well as being forced to face my own mortality.

I had visited her one last time in the nursing facility. She was in hospice and not expected to live much longer. I left her sleeping, knowing full well it would likely be the last time we would see each other on this side of eternity. I remember standing at the nurses’ station weeping. An older nurse put her arm around me and said “The Lord allowed her to raise you and take care of you, and now He wants her back.” It was a dreadfully pointed and painfully accurate thing to say. God is sovereign. He rules His own creation and is the embodiment of truth. In the same way gravity is true whether we like it or not, God’s authority over His creatures is true no matter how we feel about it; it’s not an option and we must all sooner or later concede this important reality. It’s no accident the word “authority” has the word author as its root.

It was a year before I visited her grave. As far back as I could remember I had seen her signature on countless papers and documents; later as her Power of Attorney, I myself had signed her name numerous times. Standing at her gravesite, I saw her name one more time -- in the very last place I expected to see it – etched permanently into a marker of her very full life but also an indicator of her very real mortality. The realization of the latter, that our bodies as we know them today will come to an end, and that our lives are but a dot on the line of eternity, poured over me in torrents of emotion; the last time I wept this uncontrollably was upon learning of my mother’s death over 20 years earlier.

Though I have no desire to repeat the trials of my earlier years, I will never regret who I’ve become as a result of my grandmother’s influence. She taught me to never say quit, to follow through on whatever I put my mind to, and to never blame someone else for my problems. She was truly a column of iron.



Phil 3:13-14 “…Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”