She married very young.. I think at 14. She had my mom at 16. My Grandpa was a bit of a cad.. ok not just a bit… and he never “grew” out of it. He was dashingly handsome when he was young and they made such a great couple. But Grandma got pregnant all the time and more mouths to feed just made life harder and harder for them. Over the years he mistreated his family and Grandma tried to leave him every couple of years, but she simply did not have options. Who would feed and take in a woman with 4-5-6 kids? She did not drive. She was soooo dependent. My Grandpa would never even give her money for her own pocket .. To buy groceries, she went in to the store, chose her groceries, and then she had to go out to the car to get him when it was time to pay. The aggravating thing about it is that ..he made really good money. She and the kids worked the crops in the fields all summer for whatever little their small needs were. Heaven knows, they had very little in the way of clothing and other “necessities”. Having money should not have been an issue. Except that she was just another mouth to feed to him.
Along the way she made peace with her life. If she did not like something, she snuck around and got what it was she wanted. She thought that if her husband was looking for love elsewhere, he would not come home and make her pregnant. She was really ok with that.
My earliest memories were Grandma being a mom to Bill. I always struggled with the idea of having this way younger uncle when uncles were supposed to be older and wiser. Uncles were supposed to entertain me! Not the other way around. He seemed so young and quiet. I remember her making milk from a can of evaporated milk and being appalled. I think that she was always in the backseat literally and figuratively to the men in her life. I remember her riding in the back seat of the car while Grandpa drove. It was just incomprehensible even to my child’s eyes.
After numerous times of leaving him and going back, having this person or that person help her escape and then going back to what was known and comfortable to her, they were finally divorced for real in 1973. Grandpa immediately left the state and she was left alone with Bill for the first time.. she was truly alone. I think she fully expected that this too would be a time apart and then she would go back to him like she had all the other times. But he was gone. She still loved him and often called distant relatives in Arkansas to find out what was happening in his life. She was very jealous of Daisy and spoke often of the regret of leaving him. Daisy was the woman in Arkansas.. that Grandpa married the moment his divorce was final. Daisy had had an affair with him 30 years earlier and had remembered him all those years.
In some ways she was very needy. She and Bill, her youngest boy, were such a great team during his high school years. Except that at 15-16 he was really the breadwinner and that is a tough situation to put onto a kid. They were always building onto the mobile home that was really not much more than a trailer house. Make no bones about it, I do come from trailer trash. I come by it honestly and actually I am glad for it. Bill took good care of his Mom. And while I do not know all the reasons that he walked out of his Mom’s life the moment he married, I know that he took wonderful care of her all those growing up years.
Without Bill in her life, Brenda became her closest ally. Brenda still had Todd and Rich at home but they were clearly partners in crime... really all sorts of projects. They were always scavaging and finding free food to fix. I think they once made stir fry with potato sprouts and got very ill. Tough lesson.
She was a smart woman .. street smart... she knew the political issues that affected her…. Didn’t much care for world affairs. Her world was her life immediately around her little trailer, her neighbors, the town of Forest Grove. Life for her was something to be navigated. And it took all her energy to do it.
My Grandma saved stuff. She could make something out of nothing and she would try anything. She was always growing veggies... but also flowers, beautiful flowers. I loved walking around the place with her at my side telling me stories about where this rose came from or who planted that tree 30 years ago. Family stories and plants to this day get me and I am fortunate enough to have been able to get some plants from those yards round-about-ly and I treasure them. They built a shed to hold their treasures. They built a chicken coop, too. Once, Grandma and I pruned the Hawthorne bush by the street in front of the trailer. That bush is deceptively beautiful, with mysterious purple leaves and the longest hidden thorns ever… every inch on the long stems. We cut ourselves up and it was brutal. But we did it. If I could ever be half as tough as she, I would feel pretty good. (Diane comes pretty close!)
She found treasures at garage sales and she was so incredibly proud of the very rare and special things she found. She displayed them in her little trailer in glass cabinets. The place was crowded with all sorts of things but she could tell you where she found each little statue. They were often cracked, maybe with pieces missing but Grandma never saw those defects. She handled them very delicately and I feared even touching them incase I slipped. They were so beautiful to her. When people are poor and struggle for basics, things become incredible treasures to them. I know my once Mom bought Grandma a beautiful set of dishes. She loved those dishes. And as she prepared to move away from her mobile home and had to get rid of so much of her stuff ... instead of giving the dishes back to Mom .. she called Bill one more time and tried to buy his affection. At that time Bill’s son was a teenager and my Grandma had never even seen him in person. But Bill came right over to get the dishes. They did not change the relationship.
Before Brenda and Carl were going to move to Crooked River, we had one of our only real Coker Family Reunions. Everyone was there except my Dad, and Bill and his family. Bill was a self employed janitor who drove by Brenda’s house twice while we were all there. But he did not feel like he could do that one thing to make Grandma’s joy complete. That day Grandma played the grand matriarch. She had almost all her children there. It was a cacophony of babies and older kids and the girls… Grandma’s daughters all bent over for a picture to show their best sides, Mom, Barb, Carolyn, & Brenda… Lots of pictures and lots of joy.
But one of the very best memories was the next day where my Mom and sister and I had planned a hookey day to go to the beach. Well word got out and everyone there decided to call in sick and we all spent the day at Cannon Beach. We rented a wheel chair for Grandma so that she would be able to keep up with the group. We went into a restaurant and there were like 35 of us and we all ate at one table. We had pizza. It was so fun. But the best part was going to the turnaround and my Grandmother made her way down the stairs to the sand. There was a gigantic flock of seagulls all roosting by the river. My grandmother’s frail little body made her way closer to the river and then she stood up very tall and stretched her arms over her head. I know she yelled something as she pulled her arms down and back up again. As if she were conducting an orchestra the entire zillion birds rose up into the air and appeared to dance on her command. It was an amazing site that I think of often. Size does not matter!
Later, Grandma had moved down to Crooked River with Brenda and Carl and then eventually to an adult foster home. Time passed and their were times of hard feelings. Grandma had gotten weird and she really liked life with just she and Brenda. Carl was not someone she could be close to. It caused problems. Later Carl committed suicide and Brenda found herself alone. At a time when Grandma and Brenda could have been there for each other.. too much had happened. Grandma could not find the words of comfort for Brenda and the river widened. Brenda ended up in Texas with her sister, Carolyn.
I had worked with senior services to bring Grandma to an adult foster home here in Washington County. Of her 11 grandchildren, 10 are within 20 miles of here. It seemed to make so much sense for her to be here. However, in a weird twist of fate, the day she arrived, Brenda died in Texas. It fell to me to break the news to her. It was the hardest thing I ever did. I think a light went out inside her that day. Grandma wanted to blame others… it seems so incomprehensible that someone we love is gone. Grandma and Brenda had had some sort of rift and now it was final. She never once ever said anything about Brenda being dead, she always said, “When Brenda did what she done”.
Anyway Grandma was spending something like $75 of her monthly $80 that social security allowed her to keep on a storage unit in Bend. I went down to Bend to empty the storage unit and bring the stuff home. It was so amazing to me what was in the storage unit. A lifetime of valuables turned out to be cotton from the pill bottles, muslin bandages, nightgowns of women long passed on. There was a piece of furniture, Granny’s old sideboard that looked just like it had when it was in Granny and Papa’s kitchen… cigarette burn marks on the little shelf that they kept their medicine on. Grandma had promised it to Herb and so I took it and kept it until Renee was able to take it. The rest of what was in there was total garbage. Furniture that belonged to the Goodwill .. have no idea where it came from. There was old pieces of fabric for quilts that was of no real value. There were Grandma’s dolls and they were just run of the mill baby dolls.. all went to Goodwill. The entire storage unit was just filled with stuff of no value and that is ok.. but it cost Grandma $900 a year for 4-5 years to store that stuff. I just felt bad for her. We were able to get Grandma a little of her own furniture to keep with her.
Sometimes I saw her as weak and sometimes stubborn. She could be manipulative. She was often pitiful. She was so many things.
She found joy in gossip. She was such a talker. A few months before she died.. in fact it was her birthday in January, Grandma had to go to the hospital at Tuality. I spent the day with her there. In the emergency room they had given her medication and had her under observation to see how she did. I did no dare leave because the ER doctor wanted to admit her and her doctor .. who would not come and examine Grandma herself… would not allow her to be admitted. So anyway, whatever Grandma’s symptoms were.. she was feeling much better. So she was in this room with beds lined up and curtains pulled around each bed. But oh,… Grandma was listening. She knew the guy in the next bed was from Forest Grove and something was wrong with his heart and the guy in another bed was from Hillsboro. There was an elderly man who had gone to court for something without telling his wife and they put him in jail and the guy was distraught because his wife would not know where he was and he was probably faking illness but they could not be sure so they had him there. Grandma was giggling and beaming because it was like living inside the soap opera. She had the very best birthday! (For me it was tax season and I wondered how many of these days we were going to do… too bad I did not just enjoy what gave her joy).
Grandma lived in an adult foster home in Hillsboro and totally ingratiated herself within the family like she had done at the foster homes in Bend. She became the confidant of Lynn the owner of the business. Sometimes she was less than respectful with Lynn’s longtime boyfriend. But over the years she encouraged them to marry. Grandma liked gossip. Being involved in their lives gave her more to talk about.
Grandma wanted to live to be older than her Mom. It did not matter that Granny was totally vegetative for 10 years before she died. It only mattered that Granny lived to be 101. Quality did not seem to make the list.. only the length of the years. Grandma had Parkinsons and one fatal fast moving pneumonia. In many ways I failed her. She wanted to live and I did not fight loudly enough or long enough. I stayed with her until the antibiotics began to work .. but they would not suction her lungs. I held her in the morning as the warmth left her body. She was a lonely woman at the end of her long life. I can only envision the family that had gone before her meeting her at those pearly gates. I will always miss her.DKU
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