My Nanny

Esther and Joe, 1940
Note how she
shows off her legs!

Today is the 30th anniversary of the death of my maternal grandmother, Esther Aaronson Poppel. I know this because my mom mentioned last week that she had a yahrzeit coming up. (Yahrzeit is the Yiddish word for the anniversary of the death of a loved one.) I asked my mother to consult Nanny's death certificate, did a little math, and indeed, it's been thirty years.

I'm named for my maternal grandfather Joseph, who died before I was born. So my grandmother was widowed young and never remarried. She was a constant presence in my earliest years, before we left New York. When we moved to Cincinnati, Nanny took her own apartment in Yonkers.

1961: I am 2 years old
and my sister is 6 months 

Nanny came to visit us every year for a month at a time. We carried on with our usual lives. Mom and Dad worked, my sister and I went to school, and when we came home, Nanny was there. She was a diabetic and so we always had special treats when Nanny came to visit.

My grandmother also had breast cancer. I don't know how old she was at the time of her diagnosis, but she had a mastectomy. I once saw her breast form drying in the bathroom and it took me a long time to figure out what it was. We never discussed her health, and she lived a long time after her cancer treatment. She was in her 80s when she died. A look at her birth and death certificates reveal that she was a few years older than her husband, a secret she never told my mother.

After Nanny's funeral, my mother told my sister and I that we could take any one thing from her apartment as a memento. I had always been fond of a purple glass sugar bowl and creamer and still have it after all these years, although the sugar bowl is chipped. (I found a similar set for sale here, although my creamer has a purple handle and the sugar bowl has no lid.) Evidently I have good taste - this is now a valuable collectible. But for me it's a memory of my beloved grandmother.