A hint of warmth one Sunday in an otherwise bleak April brought me to the park with my girls. The hours passed in a whirl of snacks and slides until, in what felt like no time at all, the setting sun began to cast long shadows across the blacktop. A chill in the air made me realize for the hundredth time that I had failed—once again the girls were not dressed warmly enough. With the sun going down, soon they would be shivering. It was time to go home.
As I gathered the scooter and stroller, the wipes and the leftover Pirate’s Booty, I glanced at my phone for the first time since our arrival. My heart sank. I had more than fifty texts. From experience, I knew that so many messages could mean only bad news.
As I navigated our way home, I anxiously skimmed through the messages. Many of the texts were from colleagues. The first one—simply I’m so sorry—stopped me abruptly in my tracks on a Manhattan sidewalk. Mila slammed into me on her scooter.
I made sure Mila was okay and then read the text again:
I’m so sorry . . .
Why was she sorry? What had happened?
Another message mentioned praying for my grandmother.
Had Ganny passed away?
As I pushed Poppy’s stroller and Mila scooted along, I continued to scroll and slowly realized that no one was dead. Ganny had merely made a public announcement. In the face of new health problems, she would receive only “comfort care” going forward.
I was relieved that she was still alive. And yet I was confused by the wording of this statement. What did comfort care mean? Why had she made this announcement? Would we lose her soon?
When I arrived home, I turned on a cartoon for the girls and called my parents. My mother answered on the first ring. I said I was sorry I hadn’t seen her texts earlier. Then I asked her what comfort care meant.
“Comfort care means Ganny does not want any more extreme treatments to cure her,” my mother explained. “She will have pain relief, but nothing more.”
“Does this mean she’s dying?” I asked.
“There is no way to know,” my mom said. “But I would call her to say goodbye.”
More than once, I have looked at my grandmother and thought, This woman is invincible. The epitome of strength, Ganny always seemed like she could conquer anything. Several times when my grandfather was thought to be at death’s door, she said he would recover, and almost as if he didn’t want to disobey her, he got better. I knew she wouldn’t live forever, but I couldn’t imagine life without her.
My parents had just recently spent time with her and had said their goodbyes. Henry would be in Texas the next day for business and was going to try to see her. I wanted to hop on a plane that very minute to join them, but I needed to work the next morning. I booked a flight that would leave on Tuesday, the day after a long-planned segment for the Today show aired.
That night Barbara came to my apartment. We searched each other’s eyes for some reassurance that this was not the end. We stood at my kitchen counter and decided to call our Ganny.
As the phone rang, we imagined our grandmother bedridden, assuming a nurse or relative would answer in a hushed tone. Instead, Ganny answered the phone herself. “Hi, girls!” she said in what seemed to us to be her usual strong voice.
“We love you so much!” I said. “You’re the best grandmother in the world. How do you feel?”
My voice cracked. Tears sprang to my eyes. What if this is the last time we talk to this force of nature? I thought.
Twins often cry in unison; our histories and our sensibilities are inextricably linked. Barbara started weeping seconds after I did. We tried to hide the pain in our voices, but our Ganny heard us.
“Girls, don’t worry!” she said with a laugh. “They’re making it sound like I’m already dead. Don’t believe everything you read.”
That was our Ganny. She was dying and her reaction was to comfort us—and using one of her favorite phrases. She’d spoken those same words many times over the years whenever she read something critical about someone she loved. She had used them to defend Barbara and me in our youth from accusations that we were too wild. To people who criticized us for underage drinking, for example, Ganny said they should mind their own business and not believe everything they read—we were good kids. Ganny had a reputation as an enforcer, but there were lines she would not cross. She was hesitant to give my mother advice because she didn’t want to come across as the typical domineering mother-in-law, and she gave us the space we needed to make mistakes when we were young.
Before we hung up, Ganny told us that her best friend had been there just the day before for a visit. They’d had a lovely time gossiping and sipping cocktails. This did not sound to me like a woman on the cusp of death. That night, I slept well.
THE NEXT MORNING, a Monday, I woke up with a bad sore throat. I went out to the horse farm in New Jersey that was the subject of my report. We were kicking off National Volunteer Appreciation Week, and I felt an obligation to be there to call attention to this impressive nonprofit.
While I stood waiting for my live shot outside a barn, Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb called me on air to ask me how my Ganny was doing and to send love.
“Thanks, guys,” I replied. “We are grateful for her. She is the best grandma anyone could have ever had—or have.” I felt a rush of embarrassment for having just spoken of her in the past tense, but I forged ahead. “And Barbara and I talked to her last night. She’s in great spirits and she’s a fighter. She’s an enforcer. She reminded me not to believe everything you read. So we’re grateful for her and for everybody’s prayers and thoughts. And just know the world is better because she is in it.”
They warmly said they did know that, and they asked me how my grandfather and mom and dad were holding up.
“She’s with my grandpa, the man she’s loved for over seventy-three years,” I said. “They are surrounded by family. The fact that we’re together in this and he still says, ‘I love you, Barbie,’ every night is pretty remarkable.”
As I signed off, I winced. I couldn’t believe that I had slipped into the past tense. Our Ganny was still here, surrounded by loved ones . . . and here I was speaking of her in a tense of goodbyes, memories, and heartbreak. I quickly collected myself, but the slip hurt every time I recalled it.
I still had to go live for my segment. I moved inside the barn, where I petted a horse while I listened to the programming that was leading into my package. One of the headlines that I heard made me tear up, even though I knew it was coming: “Barbara Bush will seek comfort care.”
The freezing early-morning air felt like daggers in my throat, and hearing that phrase made me shiver: comfort care. Why could I still not get my head around what that meant? Perhaps because it was a term I did not associate with my grandmother. Our Ganny was not a traditional comforter. She did not coddle. She spoke bluntly, sometimes harshly. And yet, as I thought about it, having her in the world was always a comfort. Knowing she was there—to set boundaries, to keep us all in line, to tell it like it is—had always made me feel hopeful. She made everyone in the family better. Without her, who would be there to keep order, to make sure everyone lived up to their potential, to remind us to behave?
The camera light came on and Hoda threw to me. I tried to quickly shake off my thoughts and to be present, though I could see in the monitor that I looked a little like a deer in headlights. “Hey, guys! I’m at Sunnyside Equestrian Center,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and hoping I was at least making sense. Try as I might, my mind was still with my grandmother. “Kids facing challenges of all kinds come here to work with therapeutic horses like this one and an army of volunteers! They’re changing lives one amazing horseback ride at a time!” I put the stress on strange syllables. I pronounced equestrian as if it were in a foreign language. I hoped no one would notice that I was just trying not to cry.
“Back to you,” I told the studio. “We’re all in tears.” By now my throat was burning and my voice was a painful-sounding squeak.
In the studio, my colleagues clapped and said, “Bravo!”
I was glad to have made it through, but I could not wait to pack up so I could fly to Texas.
ON TUESDAY, I woke up feeling horrible, but I called my parents and told them I was heading to Houston.
“What’s going on with your voice?” my father asked.
“Nothing,” I choked out. “Just a sore throat.”
“Didn’t Mila have strep a couple of weeks ago?” he asked.
She had.
“You should get a strep test before you fly,” he said. “Gampy is there, along with others. You can’t get them sick.”
I got a test and it turned out he was right—I did have strep. I started on antibiotics, knowing I couldn’t fly until the following day, when they’d have kicked in.
While I waited for the drugs to take effect, I received a call. My grandmother had just passed away.
I was in shock. She had been so present just two days earlier. Now she was gone. It felt symbolic to me that by this point I could barely croak out a single word. Ganny’s voice was so strong. With her departure, it seemed that my voice, too, had faded.
Henry called to see how I was and to say he was on his way to my parents’ place in Dallas. I told him that Mila had handled the news as she often does—by drawing pictures. Her hand-eye coordination was still developing, but her tiny hands created a dozen stick figures of her Great-Ganny. When she handed them to me, she said, “See? Now we’ll always remember what she looked like.” I also tried to prepare him for the scene he was likely to walk into when he arrived at my parents’ house.
“Everyone is going to be really sad,” I said. “When you get there, you should probably just put your head down and go to bed.”
He said he would do that and call me later.
I hung up feeling sorry for myself. He was going to be wrapped in the warm embrace of a full house in mourning while I lay alone in our bed, throat burning, watching the news on TV.
Later that night, I was getting myself ready for bed and half watching the news when the phone rang. It was Henry calling again. On FaceTime, I saw that he looked rosy-cheeked. He told me that I’d been far off the mark when I’d warned him that he would find a somber scene.
When he arrived, Henry encountered an amiable John Boehner, smoking, and a few glasses of red wine into the evening. My parents do not drink, but tipsy Boehner had lifted the mood of the room. He made it feel like an Irish wake. He even wound up telling Henry all about his new investments in marijuana businesses. Henry was enthusiastically recalling their conversation about the edibles market before I cut him off.
“Could you perhaps have found a better day to discuss pot legalization with John Boehner?” I said. I tried to sound stern, but a smile crept in around my scowl. I actually found it quite hilarious, and I suspected my grandmother would have appreciated the humor, too.
After all, in her last phone call with my father, he had said, “I love you, Mom. You’ve been a fabulous mother.”
“I love you, too,” she’d replied. “You’re my favorite son . . . on the phone.”
OUR GANNY DIED the way she lived: on her own terms. She was unapologetically herself up to the very end, and I secretly loved that she was able to hear people’s warmest memories of her life. In her final days, the presidential biographer Jon Meacham called and asked if she’d like to hear her eulogy, which he had written in advance. She said yes. His tribute included a story about how he’d complained to her about being mistaken for the author John Grisham. He expected grandmotherly consolation. Instead, she’d replied, “Well, how do you think poor John Grisham would feel? He’s a very handsome man.”
She told Meacham she approved of the eulogy.
Some rules are spoken or typed to hang on the backs of doors; others are taught quietly and by example. Our culture fears death in so many ways. And yet, in her maverick style, Ganny did not fear dying. She would accept only comfort care because she wanted to die as she lived—surrounded by those she loved, master of her own domain. Did she know that by dying fearlessly she was showing us the way and teaching us one last great lesson?
I smile to think of her in her final days: lying in bed in Houston, watching shows about her life, feeling grateful—and also disagreeing with the pundits! Watching the news about her legacy in those days before her death, she was able to essentially witness her own funeral. That, too, was classically Ganny. She didn’t like to miss a thing.
She died in her own bed, holding my grandpa’s hand. Her funeral four days later, held at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston, where she had attended services for fifty years, was serious but also warm. There were jokes. My uncle Jeb said, “She called her style a benevolent dictatorship, but honestly it wasn’t always benevolent.” We all laughed knowingly.
Between the viewing and funeral, some eight thousand people came to say goodbye to her, including four of the five living former presidents (Jimmy Carter was overseas). Melania Trump sat alongside the Clintons and the Obamas. The choir sang “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”
Eight of Ganny’s grandsons—my cousins—carried her coffin out of St. Martin’s after the service. Gampy’s wheelchair, pushed by my father, followed behind the casket. Mourners stood all along the motorcade route. Some wore fake pearls in her honor. She would have loved it.
Ganny was buried at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in a grave next to Robin, the daughter Ganny and Gampy lost to leukemia at the age of three. She was famous in the family for saying, often, “I love you more than tongue can tell.” Standing there looking at the two stones side by side, I felt a sense of peace. I imagined them reunited. My daydream was given expression by Marshall Ramsey, a Clarion-Ledger cartoonist. Soon after her death, he published a cartoon that showed Ganny arriving at the gates of heaven. The first thing she sees is her long-lost blond-ringleted little girl, arms outstretched, no longer sick, running toward her through the clouds.