Gramma

Blanche Valarie Blondeau was born in 1908 in Fillhilla, Saskatchewan. Years later she met and married Jules Leonard. They moved to Ontario, settling in Timmins, where Jules worked at the Macintyre Mine. Years later, having already giving birth to Lorraine and Laverne and Ronnie and Jerry, she gave birth to Edgar, my father. Blanche gave birth to my uncle Derek nine years later, and the family was complete until her children married and had children of their own. All this happened long years before I came along, the second last of my generation of Leonards.

Blanche had some rocky years before then. Times were tight. There was a Depression to weather. There was another World War to weather, too. They were blessed to have been spared the later, if not the former. Too young for the Great War, too old for the second. Her children were spared too. I think she thanked her lucky stars for that.

They moved to Cochrane and Jules began to work for the railroad, much as he had in times before, when he met Blanche and took her hand in Holy Matrimony. She got involved with the Church, spending many years in service of the Catholic Woman’s League.

Blanche and Jules

You’d think that would have been enough drama for one life, but life is rarely smooth. Blanche became ill shortly before my mother met my father. Deathly ill. She almost died. My mother tells tales of how Blanche received the last rights in her mid-forties, and how her father made it possible for Jules and Blanche to move out of the home that sat alongside an open sewer into something better. And how her father gave Jules preferential billing for all the medications Blanche needed.

Blanche recovered, but she was plagued with migraines, thereafter. They plagued her still when I was a child. I remember her shut up in a darkened bedroom on a few occasions when we came to visit. She always rose to greet us, though, despite her pain. She would. Family had come to call, don’t you know, and Blanche was all about family. Family was everything to her.

And she had a large family to dote over. It’s probably all she ever wanted. She insisted her entire family be in attendance at holidays, cooking for fifty people at a time. And they came because Blanche ruled her family as only a strong-willed matriarch can.

Blanche and Jules

I learned all these things afterwards. What I remembered was the much-loved and loving woman who enveloped me in hugs and smothered me in kisses. The woman who sang Christmas carols and watched Lawrence Welk and always had cookies and date squares and jelly rolls (once she learned of my allergies to dates and oats) at hand when we arrived.

She weathered tragedies, too. Her son Ronnie’s passing, decades before what ought to have been his appointed time. The passing of her children’s spouses: Hazel at far too young an age and Pauline many years later. My Uncle Derek’s partner, Larry, too. She buried her husband too, outliving him by more than thirty years.

When Blanche was eighty, she became too infirm to take care of herself. Not that she didn’t try. She was a proud woman, not inclined to complain, not wanting to be a burden. She couldn’t possibly take care of herself anymore though. She suffered a severe stroke, even if she rebounded from it without any noticeable effects. She suffered micro-strokes too, after that, if not before, and was just as apt to collapse to the floor as not when she had them. Those micro-strokes never left her after that, always lurking, always striking unexpectedly. My Uncle Derek would have none of her pride. He collected her and brought her home to London with him, an act that very likely made it possible for her to live for almost twenty more years.

Blanche at 80

When Blanche was about to celebrate her 99^th birthday, my uncle decided that the milestone needed marking. Not everyone makes it to 99, after all. We called it a dress rehearsal for her centennial. There was a party planned for that, too.

We came from all points of the compass. From Cochrane, from Timmins, from Thorold and St. Catherines. Fredrickhouse and Innisfill and Toronto. The Tishlers flew in from Detroit and points further south, from Ohio and Indiana and California.

I drove my father down, arriving well in advance of the festivities, having made a pit stop in Barrie to visit my friend Neil the day before. We made the last dash to London and checked into a hotel inundated with Leonards.

Blanche and family at 80

There was a wine and cheese meet and greet, lengthy conversations in the hall as we came upon one another, an evening at the Keg, and drinks in Uncle Jerry’s room, well into the night.

Tables at the reunion were by clan. Aunt Lorraine’s Tishlers here, Uncle Laverne’s brood there. Dearly departed Uncle Ronnie’s family tables here, Uncle Jerry’s there. My sister’s husband and I sat with Keith and his children. Where was my sister? At the head table with my grandmother and her surviving children. The eldest child of each family branch joined them, mostly women, all of them matriarchs now in their own right.

Sadly, that was the final happy gathering of my greater family. Blanche was ailing. We all saw it, none of us wanting to say so.

Blanche at 99

My Uncle Don, Lorraine’s husband, did, though. He made his presence known when he entered the hall, calling out “Hello, Gramma,” when he did. Big man, bigger personality. He retreated shortly afterwards, telling me, “She didn’t know me,” and “I don’t think she’s going to maker it to her 100th.”
She did not. Two months after arriving to celebrate the commencement of her 100^th year, we were called back to mark her passing.

I could not watch as they lowered her into the ground. Tears welled up. My composure faltered. I turned away and walked a short distance up the hill from the black hole she was ever so gently being slipped into. Bev followed me but kept her distance as I waved her off and broke into tears. I choked them back a few moments later and rejoined her and my family. Bev slipped her arm around me as I once again faced the grave.

Uncle Don followed soon after. Then Uncle Jerry.

My father suffered a heart attack and a couple strokes. He suffered a near fatal rectal hemorrhage due to diverticulitis. He never came home after being admitted to the hospital. He was admitted to a care facility, instead, and has been there ever since.

I’m watching the passing of the generation that raised me. It was only a matter of time. As they say, it comes to us all.

I’m no different.

My time will come, too.