Tuesdays with Gerry

Getting to know my grandmother after her 95th birthday

As integral as my grandmother Gerry Holoff was to my personal essay writing, both as Chief Encourager to tell my most personal and painful stories with honesty and transparency, and as the intended reader of the end product, I never wrote a piece about her or the peculiarly remarkable relationship we engendered in her late 90’s.

I suppose I could have. But it would’ve ultimately felt needy and contrived. It would be like giving the heroic ship’s captain and his crew the same names as the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press. Or naming a hellbent-on-finding-the-truth newspaper editor, “Oscar Nomination,” then feigning complete and total coincidence.

You can do it, of course. But it all feels a little (a lot) thirsty for approval. And I’m old school. I wanted to earn my approval. Even from my Nonie.

Well, my Grandma Gerry finally passed on, in August, a mere four months before her 100th birthday.

And because so much of our late, late, late in life friendship revolves around my essay-writing, my hesitancy to be too truthful and her rigid insistence that I must, I believe that now it’s about time that Geraldine Holoff finally gets an essay of her own.

I know few things in the world. But I know that as an emotional benefactor of mine and as a woman of prodigious, near-legendary vanity, she’d have enjoyed a proper print send-off, with a nice picture and a well-curated typeface. So here goes.

The very first thing I insist you do is to immediately disabuse yourself not any visual image you may be holding of the stereotypical, nurturing, Ashkenazi-normative Jewish bubbe.

Turns out, I learned at the funeral, that she hated the word “bubbe.” I didn’t know that, per se. But I did intuitively pick up that she loathed playing that part. She was tall, ageless, movie star thin. She carried herself with regal, Gentile bearing, like a matriarch on Falcon Crest. This was not your grandmother’s grandmother, shtetl-bound and reeking of cabbage soup. She was literally whatever the Teutonic opposite of the cozy bubbe archetype could be while still technically holding a synagogue membership.

In short, I was terrified of her. Well into my fifties. Not hers. Mine.

We had what can only be described as a formal relationship. She was the mother of my mother. And we were about as intimate as that sounds.

Which is not to say she wasn’t a powerful figure in my upbringing and beyond. But far more as a symbol, a figurehead than a confidant.

When she passed away in August, it was frankly shocking. Because at that point she had lived so long, been such a prominent, ubiquitous figure in our lives, outlived everyone of her contemporaries, who was to say that she hadn’t gamed the system? Who truly, inexorably believed that she wouldn’t live forever.

I get it’s beyond strange to say “I didn’t see it coming” when someone dies at 99 years, 8 months. But I honestly didn’t see it coming.

Gerry had always been here. Why wouldn’t she continue to be? Her life up to that point had defied any and all probability. She was blessed with good fortune, good love, good health, good family, and good genes. Plus, I lovely condo on the Wilshire Corridor.

She lived long and healthily enough to not only have a great granddaughter, but have one already graduate from college.

What a mathematical impossibility. One that requires a perfect storm of fortuitous living. Meeting the love of your life as a teenager. Living a life of health and prosperity. And then, passing peacefully within a whisper of a century.

As I said at her funeral to almost too much knowing laughter: Gerry Holoff’s life just goes to show that in America, if you are white, rich, thin, and pretty, you may also be blessed with the longest life anyone has ever heard of.

But my Gerry story, my unexpectedly close relationship, isn’t a story of how many years she lived, but how she chose to live her final years.

And, having talked to most of her other grandkids, this was a dynamic that played out with all of them. A distant figure. Didn’t really connect. And then became their biggest champions in her final years.

Like all Bill Murray redemption movies, her story is that of someone who was cold and inferior, seemingly incapable of looking beyond herself and expressing love. But then, she began to soften, to reconcile, to heal.

What had once been a voice laced with critique, now sounded suspiciously like encouragement. And acceptance. And love.

It was completely fascinating and even more thoroughly unexpected. Because, while we all possess the capacity to change, doing so is far from a foregone conclusion.

There is nothing inevitable about using your extra time to repair some of the wounds that you yourself caused. And I should add, that not every fracture was healed. Which makes the friendship we forged even more fortunate.

Remember, we’re talking about someone in their hundredth year on Earth still changing and evolving. Most people’s thinking would have long atrophied. Somehow she was getting more open-minded and progressive in her thinking. In her late nineties!

Even ten years earlier, I’d have been an incredibly unlikely eulogist. I knew her. But I didn’t “know” her.

Like I said earlier, she was hardly bubbe material. In some ways, it wasn’t her fault, it was bad casting. You don’t hire Jean Harlow to make matzoh ball soup.

Frankly, she wasn’t that nice. Which made her transition to my biggest creative booster, all the more astounding.

There was the time at Thanksgiving, when she pulled me close for a hug and whispered in my ear, “when am I going to see my thin grandson again?”

What? This is a grandmother speaking?

Another time, she and her partner Murray invited Beth and I to dinner. I had been a professional sitcom writer for 4 seasons at that point. Before we even ordered appetizers, she asked, “Why are shows you’re on so bad?”

Again, not the grandmotherly response I was expecting. I started to explain, “I didn’t create them. I’m fortunate to be in the business. Etc.”

I then offered, with the grave neediness of a rescue dog, that earlier in the day I had a meeting on Frasier, which was in the midst of a five year winning streak for Outstanding Comedy at the Emmys.

Surely, this would prompt a, dare I even say it, mazel tov.

Nope. She responded, “that’s a bad show, too.”

Before my head could fly through the Marquis West roof, a sidebar with Beth calmed me down.

“She’s older. She’s not in the business. Don’t take it personally.”

The second we come back to the table, Murray asks “Why don’t you write more like David Kelley?” And Gerry chimes in, “It’s David E. Kelley.”

It wasn’t that she was old and didn’t know the business. She not only knew celebrity Showrunners of the early aughts, she even knew their fucking initials.

She just didn’t like the work I was doing. And had no problem sharing it. With her own sensitive grandson.

Okay, so knowing that, even the most sanguine optimist, which I am not, could have ever predicted the meaningful, respectful relationship that Gerry and I developed after her 95th birthday.

I’m not sure how it happened, but others have confirmed it did.

By the end of her life, no one expressed more pride in me. No one offered more encouragement in all facets of my life, but especially in making sure I wrote about the most painful, personal parts of my own history.

She demanded that I had to let others learn from me. And be healed by me. And that, in turn, I’d begin to heal myself.

I used to chuckle every time we’d speak, because she’d invariable, like clockwork, compare me to Mitch Albom, the Tuesdays at Morrie guy.

Now if a peer or a Gen Zer called me that, they might mean it as smear, a way of suggesting my emo style of essaying was veering into some Chicken Soup Soul level of schmaltz. But I knew what she meant and took it as such.

She believed, fervently, that even though I’d devoted myself to a life of comedy, I had things to say, sad things, brutal things, that went deeper than my previous life of one-liners.

But why now? Why did she suddenly develop a compassionate approach, an expansive view of the world, a trenchant understanding of a creative’s inner needs.

The best I can offer is that we both reached a point of not giving a shit around the same time. Her from age and accrued wisdom. Me from tragic loss. When my dad died by suicide in 2008, I suddenly stopped caring what anyone else might say about me. And as a result of not caring, most said really nice things.

We both ripped off the band aid of facades that families erect to not have to deal with uncomfortable truths.

I lived long enough to see her soften. I witnessed her famously sharp edges begin to dull and replace themselves with kindness and persistent encouragement. She impressed upon me, regularly, that I had value that I myself couldn’t see.

You know, like a bubbe.

She wanted to write everything, to share it all. The last call we had we even had a little fight. Because she wanted me to write an essay about a lovely dinner I had for my mom’s birthday and I didn’t want to appear to be exploiting it.

I didn’t know it would be our last call. But I was keenly aware that I’d be okay if it was.

We said what he had needed to say. We had left it all on the table. That’s all you can ask for in any relationship- that when you leave, you leave free of regret and remorse.

Even in her bonus hours, Gerry taught that we are still capable of change. And that no one should be incapable of seeking some sort of reconciliation.

At an age when most people retreat and turn inward, Gerry Holoff, as much as she was capable, faced forward and reached out.

We made our peace. We became friends. And we got to genuinely know each other. And isn’t that we all want? To be seen and heard and understood.

After all was said and done, she finally grew into the role of Jewish grandmother. If you live long enough, you’ll see everything.

It was a part she was born to play. It just took her 99 years to realize it.

Just don’t call her a “bubbe.” She wouldn’t like that. Or who knows, maybe she would.