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Our family said goodbye to my grandmother last weekend.
Eileen Walsh — “Mrs. Walsh” as she was known to nearly a generation of students at St. Basil Catholic School in Vallejo — died peacefully in palliative care at the hospital on the morning of May 18, almost a month from her 87th birthday.
As I work to process the grief that is still setting in, I find myself trying to latch onto a prevailing positive feeling. I’m so grateful: that I had such an impactful and inspirational woman to help mold me, that she got to know my wife and my young son, that I got to spend so much time with her in life, and that I was able to make it back from vacation to see her before the end.
She showed me the value of education and educators. She gave tirelessly for her family, her students, her friends and the cancer patients she drove to medical appointments in retirement (even into her 80s). She was probably the most open-minded and understanding person I’ve known. She was well-read, she listened and she valued others’ perspectives.
I wouldn’t be the man I am today without the guiding hand of Grandma Walsh.
Born Eileen Twissell on June 26, 1937, my grandma was raised in Crockett — an only child and first-generation American whose father worked at the C&H Sugar Factory there.
As the stories go, she (and all of us descendents) may have been lucky to even be here. Her birth was a very difficult one, she had her share of tough injuries growing up and as a young woman survived a serious car crash where she was pronounced dead at the scene before someone found a pulse.
It really makes you think about how thin the line of existence can be sometimes. (It also leaves me wishing I had documented her early-life tales more directly, as I’m sure they’ll get better for the telling as the generations grow.)
My dad was the second of her four children in less than seven years. She primarily raised her kids but did work some part-time jobs as a mother, including a teacher’s aide at their school (St. Basil’s) just a few blocks from their house in Vallejo.
It was after her children grew and my grandparents divorced that she really entered the classroom full-time, teaching sixth grade at the Catholic campus. She taught there pretty much my whole youth.
I am the eldest Walsh grandchild. Spending my childhood in Vallejo and Benicia, I got to see my grandma often.
Operating on a school schedule herself, she would usually share the duty of driving me to afternoon baseball or soccer practices or karate classes. In my adolescence, I would be over almost every other weekend, watching classic movies or TV murder-mysteries, playing logic games, “helping” her grade assignments or just talking.
Those memories have been rushing back. As has recent reminiscing about trips she and I took (or us with my sister) to visit my aunts in San Diego and Utah in the summers. Those car rides are why I love listening to Harry Belafonte and Patsy Cline (although others, like Barbra Streisand and Yanni, never really stuck for me).Â
Consensus is John Denver was her favorite. I played some with her during a brief period of just she and I in the hospital room last week. I wish I could say it spurred a squeeze of the hand or a smile or a change in breath, but the end of life doesn’t always come with a movie moment.
It meant the world to me all the same.
Familiar songs hit differently that evening: “Carolina in My Mind” (thinking of my sister with her young kids at home in North Carolina), my personal fave (his version of “San Francisco Mabel Joy”) and of course grandma’s No. 1, “Some Days Are Diamonds (Some Days Are Stone)”.
She would pass away a day and a half later, after spending the better part of four days in the comfort care stage in the wake of a health avalanche that began with a fall a couple of weeks earlier.
As hard as it was to see her unresponsive and deteriorating in a bed at the same hospital complex where I was born, I’m so thankful that I could visit with her and her children and that she seemed so calm and restful at the end.
For now, I’ll keep trying not to dwell as this persistent “cold wind blows a chill in my bones” and instead embrace when the “sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.” It’s what grandma would want.
Editor’s note: Jeremy Walsh is the editorial director for the Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division. His “What a Week” column is a recurring feature in the Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine and DanvilleSanRamon.com.
Excellent tribute to your grandmother.