Remembering Bubbie, My Sun-Loving, Costume Jewelry-Clad Grandmother

Bubbie was born a brunette, but I only ever saw her with red hair. Like many women of her generation, she went to the “beauty shop” once a week, where Cathy, her hairdresser for decades, dyed her hair and styled it in a French twist.

Bubbie’s brothers, Albert and Norman, adored her. So did my mom, Debbie, and my aunt Diana, identical twins she gave birth to in 1956. Everyone in her orbit adored her.

She spent most of her career as a secretary at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and then as an assistant to the head of the Maryland Board of Nursing, jobs that she told me about with pride.

A lifelong fan of Broadway shows, she worked part-time in retirement as a hostess on a charter bus from Baltimore to New York City, where she enjoyed seeing musicals like Les Misérables, A Chorus Line and The Phantom of the Opera, visiting museums, shopping for knockoffs on Canal Street and eating at street fairs.

On one of our many day trips to New York together, she took me to her favorite greeting card store, a hole-in-the-wall in midtown Manhattan with shelves that looked like they hadn’t been dusted since the Reagan administration. We spent over an hour there reading and laughing at all the cards. We left with more than a dozen, including some with wildly inappropriate birthday wishes and fart jokes, which I think were her favorite. She probably spent more on greeting cards that day than she did on my bar mitzvah gift. (Sadly, the shop is now closed.)

Another thing I learned on those trips to New York was that she had an encyclopedic knowledge of every clean public restroom within a one-mile radius of Times Square, like a walking Yelp filter for bathrooms. (Pro tip: The restrooms in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square are spotless.)

She was a terrible cook — her brisket could have been repurposed as a doorstop — but food was still her love language. When I went to sleepaway camp in middle school, my bunkmates were in awe of the daily care packages I received from Bubbie: big boxes stuffed with honey mustard pretzels, Hershey’s Kisses, Oreos, gummy worms and peanut M&M’s. Each package came with a handwritten letter signed “Love, bubs” — the same thing she wrote on all my birthday cards.

No birthday card arrived last year, which was around the time she began suffering from dementia. It started subtly, with short memory lapses and brief moments of disorientation, which are early warning signs of the disease. Over time, she became increasingly forgetful, reaching the point where she would occasionally greet me as her nephew.

She died from a rare type of blood cancer. When I heard the news, I felt a mixture of sorrow and gratitude — sorrow that she was gone, but deeply grateful that she had lived long enough to meet my wife, Alex, and our daughters, Amelia and Nora.

She was always my biggest cheerleader when it came to my aspirations of becoming a journalist. She clipped every story I wrote, no matter how small, beginning with my high school newspaper. She always joked that I should write about her. Now look, Bubbie, I have.

If there’s a heaven, I hope Bubbie is tanning on a lawn chair, surrounded by reflectors, asking the angels not to block her sunlight.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.