Grandma took me to see Hamlet on stage when I was ten. It was my first experience of Shakespeare, and my first awareness that within his work were lines now common knowledge. When the audience tittered at “something is rotten in Denmark,” Grandma whispered “that’s a very famous line people use today to mean something seems suspicious.” When Hamlet began to deliver his famous soliloquy, I could tell by the hushed, reverent demeanor of the crowd that "To be or not to be" and the exquisite phrases that flowed on the dim, still air – "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," "perchance to dream," "The undiscover’d country" – were familiar in a sacred kind of way. Though I had been raised on poetry and biblical fare packed with other lovely phrases and shared meanings, I suddenly knew that I had been missing out. When I got home I used my allowance to buy Hamlet and Twelfth Night, the only Shakespearean plays the book store had. I read them slowly, savoring the language, guessing, by the roll and the bite of the words, the phrases most people might know.
But it wasn’t Shakespeare who introduced me to his art; it was Grandma. She didn't lecture me on its educational value. By taking me to the play and knowing the famous lines, she implicitly introduced it as important – and she flattered and empowered me with her apparent belief that I would gain something by attending.
It was my first venture into that undiscovered country, and it changed my life--she changed my life. I would one day study Shakespeare in depth, as an English major, under the tutelage of excellent professors. But I never forgot that my grandma had led me their way. Shakespeare's home in Stratford-on-Avon, where he was born April 23, 1564.
I saw Grandma as savvy and smart, and I began to look to her for other ways in to the world. She took me to my first opera, my first theater movie, and my first art gallery. By exposing me to art forms that revealed a broad range of human experience, she gave me ways in to compassion. By sharing elements and forms of artistic creation, she gave me ways in to expression.
Grandma was an artist herself – a creative spirit of whose talents I was immensely proud. She could play the piano by ear, and she painted realistic watercolors of my favorite places – familiar beaches, mountains, and rivers. As a teen she carved castles into wood to make beautiful bookends. She sewed with the skill and finesse of a professional seamstress, and her creations were extraordinary: wedding gowns, fancy draperies, upholstery and slipcovers, quilts. There was nothing she could not create with fabric and thread, and, in her nineties, with yarn. She not only appreciated beauty, but created it, and gave it away as self-expressing gifts. Grandma was best at sharing her love this way.
Her self, as the gift in the gift, was all the more valuable because she gave it care. She always looked ten to fifteen years younger than her age, and her attire showed a seamstress’s eye for fashion and fit. Despite severe scoliosis and sciatica, she was determined not to resort to a wheelchair, even when her younger friends did. It was Grandma who had taken me at thirteen to get my first salon haircut, treated me to meals in nicer restaurants than I was used to, and set strong examples for me of poise and grace – examples I have never yet lived up to.
She had not had the opportunity to go to college, but she had always made sure her intellect was constantly fed. She worked the New York Times crossword puzzle daily, and could out-Scrabble anyone who dared to take her on. She gave tirelessly, not only of her art but of her mind and time. In her seventies, when she lived in Pacific Grove, she managed an auction house – I can still remember the late afternoon light slanting over her manicured hands as she moved them through trays of illuminated jewels. In her eighties she managed an entire apartment complex and a charity thrift store, which took in a million dollars under her direction. Here's Grandma at 98, which she made look like the new 70.
She wasn’t a warm, cuddly, cookie-baking grandma, but I already had one of those. Grandma exemplified another way of being, exuding an elegance, a community involvement, and a cultural awareness to which I aspired. I have never measured up to her, but she always made me feel as if I had. Her eyes lit up whenever she saw me, and she talked to me as if I were a peer.
I wrote these thoughts last night [February 19, 2015], sitting on a patio overlooking the Pacific she loved, knowing her end was at hand, then took them to her bedside, where I read them aloud to her in second person. She had been on a morphine drip for several days, and though her eyes were open, there was no way to know if she could hear me. I just wanted to express, one more time, how much her sharing of art and self had meant to me over the years. How much I had looked up to her and learned from her. How much she had affected my life. Hamlet and the Gravediggers by Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret, 1883
Then I read Hamlet’s soliloquy to her, slowly, carefully. Every intensely meaningful line seemed written just for her. I told her I knew she was struggling with that question herself, of "to be or not to be," and that I understood the fear of "what dreams may come" -- that it does indeed "make cowards of us all." I told her I had always been proud of her strength and determination, in the face of pain, fear, and more. I kissed her forehead. Her eyes flickered with momentary expression – perhaps recognition.
But Grandma, I whispered in my heart, your light is still burning as bright as it always did. Wherever "the undiscover’d country” is, it will be all the more glorious after you arrive.
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Mabel White Thompson was born August 14, 1916 and passed away February 19, 2015, the night this essay was originally written.
(William Shakespeare died on his birthday, April 23, 1616, three centuries to the year before Grandma was born.)
That's our sister Cathy looking over the sofa, and Grandma reading to my brother David and me, around 1964.
Grandma with my son Tyler in 1991, on her 75th birthday.
