I’ve been trying all week to figure out how you put someone like Grandma into words, and I honestly don’t think you really can. Every time I thought I had her story figured out, somebody would tell me something else about her—something from when she was little, something she said years ago, something she did that I had never heard before—and somehow every new story made perfect sense because it was so completely her.
We all knew Grandma, but we each knew a different piece of her. Some knew her as Mom. Some as Grandma. Some as Great-Grandma. Some knew the young woman she was before most of us were even thought of. Some knew her in Maryland. Some knew her on Wildcat Mountain. Some knew her when her house was full of children, and some of us knew her later, when she finally had a little more time to just be herself.
So instead of trying to list every single thing she ever did, I think what I really want to do is tell you who Eva was.
Before she was Grandma, before she was Mom, and before she was Herman’s wife, she was Eva Viola Sebald, a little girl from Baltimore. She was born on October 21, 1942, and she was the oldest child in her family. She grew up in a three-story townhouse, with her grandparents living on the top floor, and she helped with her younger siblings from an early age.
She and her sister Pat would go to the movies on Sundays, get popcorn for about a quarter, and sometimes stay and watch the movie again. Her mother would send the children a couple of blocks down the street to get groceries, and there was even a time when Eva and her family were part of a television program connected to one of her teachers, who did puppet shows. One of the little memories that came up this week was her pushing Leonard around when he was small.
Those are tiny pieces of a childhood most of us never got to see, and I’ve loved hearing them because they remind me that Grandma had a whole life before she ever became ours.
As she got older, she loved roller skating. Wednesday nights were skating nights, and one of those ordinary nights changed the rest of her life. Grandma was around fifteen when she met Grandpa. He was in the Army and stationed at Fort Meade, and they were skating in Pasadena when he fell. Everybody else kept skating around him, but Grandma noticed he was struggling to get back up, so she stopped and reached out her hand to help him.
And then he told her his name was Billy.
I still think that is so funny because it is such a ridiculous beginning to such a huge part of her life. She helped this boy up off the floor, and the very first thing he did was give her a fake name. Most of us probably would have been done right there. Grandma wasn’t. She forgave him, found out his name was actually Herman, and somehow “Billy” still managed to win her over.
And the more I think about that story, the more I realize how much it says about her. Grandma could forgive people. She could forgive things that most of us probably would have held onto. She hated hurting people’s feelings. She did not like conflict. She wanted people to get along, and she almost always tried to be the bigger person. I don’t think that was weakness in her. I think it showed just how much love she had in her to give.
Grandpa started coming to her family’s house to see her, and eventually they built a life together. They stayed in Maryland for a few years, and Grandma was already a mother there with her two oldest children before they moved to Kentucky. Then this young woman who had grown up in Baltimore, near the water and the city life she knew, found herself on Wildcat Mountain.
It could not have been more different.
The houses were rough, and at one point the kitchen had a dirt floor. Grandma did not arrive in Kentucky already knowing how to live that life. She had to learn it. She watched her mother-in-law, Bessie. She paid attention to how things were done, how she cooked, how she made a home, and Grandma learned.
That was something she did her entire life. Every time life changed, she figured out what she needed to do next. She came from Baltimore and learned mountain life. She started motherhood in Maryland and then continued raising her family in Kentucky. She adapted without making a big show of it, and somehow she did it without becoming bitter or hard.
Eventually, there were sixteen children.
When we were talking about those years, someone pointed out that Grandma went through all those years without really having a pocketbook of her own. She had a diaper bag. And to me, that says so much. For so many years, almost everything she carried was for somebody else.
Every morning she would get up early enough to feed a house full of children. The old cook stove would be burning and the house would smell like wood smoke while she rolled out biscuit dough by hand. She made homemade biscuits, bacon, and gravy, and the family still talks about the huge skillet she used and how heavy it must have been. Everything was homemade.
One of the little things I learned this week was that Grandma used to say her own mother could not cook, which is funny considering how much cooking ended up becoming part of Grandma’s life.
But those mornings were not special occasions then. They were just everyday life. The kids probably didn’t think much about the smell of wood smoke or the biscuits or how much work went into getting breakfast on the table. It was just what Mom did. And I think that is one of the painful things about losing somebody. So many of the things you miss the most are the things nobody realized were memories while they were happening.
What amazes me is that even with sixteen children, Grandma never seemed to let any of them become just one of sixteen. Every year on their birthdays, she would tell them the story of the day they were born. She remembered them individually.
And then the grandchildren came. And the great-grandchildren. And in-laws. And friends. And people who somehow just became part of the family.
I honestly don’t know how one person holds that many people in their heart and still makes them feel like there is room for them, but Grandma did. Not everybody needed the same kind of love from her. Some needed comfort. Some needed encouragement. Some needed to laugh. Some just needed to know Grandma was there. She had this way of loving people in whatever way they needed to be loved.
There had to be days when she was exhausted. There had to be moments when she wanted to sit down and have nobody ask her for one more thing. She was human. But most of her children and grandchildren did not see that part. What they remember is that Grandma was there. She made things feel like they were going to be okay.
If you got hurt, she might tell you, “You’ll get better before you get married.” If today was bad, there was always, “Tomorrow is gonna be a better day.” And of course, “Lord’s willing.”
She also just did not get aggravated like the rest of us do. If people got lost driving somewhere and everybody else was frustrated, Grandma would laugh. If something went wrong, she would laugh. It was almost like she understood something the rest of us forget: sometimes you cannot fix what happened, so you might as well find something funny about it and keep going.
Even preparing for this funeral reminded us of that. Grandma had wanted a certain kind of blue dress, and after she passed, family searched everywhere trying to find the right one. People looked in different towns, online, even in Maryland, and of course there were multiple people on different phones trying to make sure everybody agreed before a store closed. Somehow it all came together at the last minute, and I really think Grandma would have laughed at all of us stressing over it. And there is something special about the fact that the dress coming to Kentucky for her came from Maryland, where her story began.
Another thing that meant so much to Grandma was music. Family and friends could sit in her dining room for hours playing instruments and singing, sometimes until close to midnight. Somebody would ask her if she was tired or ready for bed, and she would say, “As long as you’re sitting here playing and singing, I’m gonna listen.”
And she would.
She loved hearing it.
She and Grandpa also kept roller skating through the years, and they loved going out dancing together. They were good enough that they actually won trophies. And I love that age never really took that desire to dance away from her. Toward the end, she might not have been able to move the way she once could, but give her a son, a grandson, or a son-in-law to hold onto and she would still shuffle those feet.
Her body could slow down, but there were parts of Eva that age simply could not take.
The beach was another one of those things. Grandma loved the water. She had grown up in Maryland and later around Mount Pleasant Beach and Stoney Creek, and the ocean stayed with her for the rest of her life. If she had a chance to go, she wanted to go. The family has talked about the beach being her getaway, and I think that is exactly what it was. It was somewhere her mind could rest after a lifetime of taking care of everybody else.
She loved cruises and seafood. She loved root beer. She loved Hershey’s chocolate from the time she was little, and as she got older she had her Hershey cup that she always wanted her coffee in. Those seem like such small things until someone is gone. Then suddenly a Hershey cup is not just a cup anymore.
What I also love about Grandma is that she did not have to be somewhere exciting to decide life was good. She could have absolutely nothing planned and still say she was having the best day ever. She could sit outside and watch the rain, watch a storm come through, notice birds or bugs or whatever was around her, and genuinely enjoy it.
She appreciated ordinary life.
And I think that is something I hope all of us remember. We spend so much time thinking happiness is somewhere out ahead of us. On the next trip. After the next problem is fixed. When things calm down. Grandma could find it sitting on a porch.
Family was really all she needed. After Grandpa was gone, people would sometimes encourage her to get out more or find companionship or make new friends, and she would tell them she already had her family. And she meant it. Her children were enough. Her grandchildren were enough. Her great-grandchildren were enough.
Once Leonard and Patricia were in school, life changed for Grandma again. She had spent so many years raising children that a lot of things for herself had simply had to wait. Then she went out and built another part of her life. She entered the workforce, earned her GED, got her driver’s license, got a car, tutored high school students, and eventually paid off her home.
That part of her story matters so much because it would have been easy for someone in her position to say, “Well, this is just my life now.” Grandma didn’t. When she needed to learn mountain life, she learned it. When she needed to raise children, she did it. When her children grew and there was finally room for something more, she stepped into that too.
She was always strong, but it was not a loud kind of strength. She did not spend her life telling everybody how hard things had been or how much she had overcome. She just kept doing what was in front of her. And somehow she managed to stay soft while she did it.
A lot of people go through hard things and become harder because of them. Grandma went through hard things and somehow became more forgiving. She never wanted to hurt anybody. She never wanted people fighting. She did not keep score. And maybe sometimes she gave people more chances than the rest of us thought they deserved. But if that was one of her faults, then I hope some of us inherit it.
Independence mattered so much to Grandma, which made the last part of her life hard in a different way. Her mind still wanted to do everything. She still wanted to go places, dance, help people, cook, travel, and take care of herself. But her body started asking her to accept help she did not want.
I think what was hardest was not simply getting older. It was knowing exactly who she still was inside and not always being able to make her body cooperate with that person.
She told different family members that she was ready to go home. She had also told people that if she ever closed her eyes and did not wake back up, she had lived the life she wanted to live and had done what she wanted to do.
And I keep thinking about that, because what a gift.
What a gift to get eighty-three years and be able to look back at them and say, “I lived.”
Not that everything was perfect. It wasn’t. Not that nothing ever hurt. Things did. But she lived. She loved. She raised a family. She saw the ocean. She danced. She skated. She laughed. She worked. She learned. She forgave. She watched her children grow up and then watched their children grow up.
She lived enough life that when she said she was ready to go home, she could say it knowing she had not wasted the one she had been given.
Grandma loved Jesus. She did not have to sit in a church every Sunday for the people who knew her to understand that. It was in “Lord’s willing.” It was in how deeply she believed in forgiveness. It was in how much she wanted people to love one another. It was in the way she tried to see the good in people.
One of her favorite songs was “Precious Memories,” and I don’t think that phrase could fit any better now.
Because that is what we are left holding.
All these memories that seemed ordinary when they were happening and suddenly feel priceless now. Wood smoke in the morning. Biscuits. Music coming from the dining room late at night. Dancing. Roller skates. The Hershey cup. Root beer. The ocean. Her sayings. Her laugh. The way she could make you believe tomorrow really might be better.
And then there is the way she left us.
I have thought about it a lot because I think it says something about her. Even in her final moments, Grandma was still trying to walk. After a lifetime of figuring things out, doing for herself, taking care of people, and refusing to give up her independence easily, she was still trying to go.
And when somebody said that Grandma was still walking and then “walked right into Heaven,” it felt different than just a comforting thing people say after someone dies.
It felt like her.
She had spent her whole life moving forward through whatever came next, and at the very end, she was still moving forward.
I think that is the way I want to picture her. Not helpless. Not defined by what her body could no longer do. I want to picture Grandma doing what she always did: trying to get up and go.
And then going home.
When I think about her now, I do not want us to only remember her as Herman’s wife or the mother of sixteen children or Grandma or Great-Grandma, even though she was so proud to be all of those things.
I want us to remember Eva.
The girl from Baltimore who loved to roller skate. The sister who went to the movies with Pat. The young woman who reached out her hand to a stranger on a skating rink floor and ended up building a life with him—even after finding out his name was not Billy. The city girl who learned mountain life. The mother who got up before everybody else to feed her family.
The woman who could love so many people and somehow make them feel like they mattered individually. The woman who forgave more than most of us ever could. The woman who would rather laugh than stay aggravated. The woman who could listen to music until midnight. The woman who kept dancing when dancing had become nothing more than a little shuffle of her feet. The woman who could sit through an ordinary rainy day and still call it the best day ever.
I know we are going to miss her in ways we probably do not even understand yet. We are going to miss her in the obvious ways, but I think we are also going to miss her in little moments that catch us off guard. Somebody is going to pick up Hershey’s chocolate and think of her. Somebody is going to hear music late at night. Somebody is going to smell biscuits cooking. Somebody is going to see the ocean. Somebody is going to say “Lord’s willing” and realize exactly where they got it.
And for just a second, she will be right there again.
I don’t know that we could ever put everything Eva was into words. I don’t think that is possible.
But maybe we do not have to.
Maybe we honor her by taking the best things she gave us and carrying them with us. By forgiving a little easier. By laughing when things do not go as planned. By loving our family while we still have them. By stopping when somebody needs a hand. By dancing even if all we can manage is a shuffle. By appreciating an ordinary day while we are still living it.
And by remembering that tomorrow, Lord’s willing, is gonna be a better day.
