I remember so clearly the hours and the months that followed my Ganny’s death and how many people’s memories of her I heard. The night she died, I lay in bed alone, watching the news. My parents and Henry were in Texas. My girls were sleeping down the hall. Outside, the city was as quiet as it ever gets. From under the covers, I took in one “In Memoriam” segment after another.
Many of the tributes were beautiful. Ganny’s voice came through my speakers. “Whether you are talking about education, career or service, you are talking about life . . . ,” she said over a montage of images of her as First Lady, “and life really must have joy. It’s supposed to be fun!” There she was, glowing on my screen: Ganny as a young woman, as a new mother, and, later, as the matriarch of her large brood, showing the lines of time, a map of life well lived covering her face.
Then came the pundits. Sitting around glass desks in cold studios, these strangers discussed my grandmother as if they knew her. That first night, the family was too distraught to speak in public. That void was filled by the voices of some people who pretended to have had more access to her than they did. It hurt my heart to hear them.
One talking head said, “We Bush insiders”—I cringed; can you imagine referring to yourself as an insert-family-name-here insider?—“all knew she was going to die first, before her husband.”
We knew no such thing! I thought. If anything, we imagined our Gampy would pass first. His health was more fragile, and her dedication to him was strong as steel. She will die one day after him, of a broken heart, I always assumed.
Those people on TV, perfectly positioned and clad in camera-friendly shades like cobalt blue, were not filled with malice. Some of them I’d met. But they didn’t know her like we did. To see them pontificate in such a blasé way about her death made me feel more alone than I was, and it made me miss her more than I already did. I smiled to imagine what Ganny would say to the woman who uttered so carelessly the line about how we all knew she would die first!
As if to counteract the noise, I scrolled through my phone, looking for her—swiping through pictures and emails we’d exchanged. I made screenshots of countless images of her and reread her emails over and over again, just to hear her voice in my head.
Do you remember when you stuck your tongue out at the press? (In a tribute to my having done that, she once gave me a framed formal portrait of herself, wearing her signature pearls, sticking out her tongue.)
Dear friends for dinner, cocktails first on the deck . . . a glorious night. Thank you so very much. Ganny.
And, so often: I love you and your precious family.
The TV screen was full of people speaking of Ganny, the politician’s wife. But where was Ganny the grandmother who read to us from our summer reading as the sun set outside our window in Maine? Where was Ganny, the lover of all dogs, even the meanest among them? My girls called Ganny’s favorite pets her “bad dogs.”
I laughed to remember how one of those bad dogs had bitten a family member in a tender place and held on with all its might. Rather than punish the dog, Ganny scolded the family member for provoking her beloved pet. Provoking it how? I wanted to ask her. With his ass? But I knew better than to push back on Ganny when it came to her dogs. Politics, yes. Those little hellhounds, no.
I thought back on my grandmother as she really was. I thought of the list of rules Ganny had taped on the doors of every room in their house in Maine. She lived by rules, and yet she was not afraid to break them. I remembered the day at Harry’s Bar in Venice, Italy, when she ordered Barbara and me our first martinis. We believed that sipping a martini would bring us our grandmother’s elegance and refinement—but we thought it tasted like rubbing alcohol! Straight vodka, we decided, was repulsive! Sorry, Ganny. I know we shouldn’t say words like repulsive.
I thought about snide, funny comments she had made. I thought of her sitting at our dinner table, opinionated and slightly intimidating, discussing the news of the day. I missed her powerful life force. The world felt less vivid without her in it. With these thoughts swirling in my weary mind, I did what I used to do when I missed Ganny when she was alive: I wrote her a letter, crying as I did so.
Dearest Ganny,
When we lost you, we lost one of the greats. You were our family’s rock, the glue that held us together. I hope you know in your final days how many people prayed for you, how many people told me they loved you. It was like that my whole life. People stopped me everywhere—in airports, on the street—and declared their love for you. It always felt good. We didn’t mind sharing you with the world.
We called you the “enforcer.” It was because, of course, you were a force and you made the rules clear. Your rules: treat everyone equally, don’t look down on anyone, use your voices for good, read all the great books. (Oh, how I will miss sharing books with you!) You taught us very early never to say “Yuck,” but to politely demur when offered a dish we didn’t like and, if pressed, to say, “No, thank you. I don’t care for that.”
I will never forget when Barbara and I, as seven-year-olds visiting you and Gampy at the White House, snuck to the bowling alley and ordered presidential peanut butter sandwiches. We couldn’t wait for someone to deliver what was sure to be the fanciest sandwich of our life. Then you opened the door. You scolded us, telling us that under no circumstances could we order food in the White House like that again. This was not a hotel. You taught us humility and grace.
You and Gampy embodied unconditional love. At our wedding Henry and I asked you to read because we so hoped we could emulate your love story. Your love letters will be passed down to my girls so they know what true devotion looks like.
You always said, “Humor helps.” Nights spent sitting around the dinner table in Maine laughing at old family stories were made better because of your laugh. Humor was necessary because of summers surrounded by seventeen raucous grandkids in Kennebunkport. Kids who filled the hot tub with soap, creating a giant bubble bath. Kids who loved doing cannonballs over your head while you peacefully swam laps.
From you, Ganny, I have learned the gift of uniqueness and authenticity: from wearing mismatched Keds to your signature pearls and snow-white hair. You taught us that humor, wit, and grace are the best accessories and that worrying too much about looks is (in your words) boring. Words matter, kindness matters. Looks fade.
In one of your final emails to me you wrote very little. The subject line was simply “YOU.” In the body of the email you wrote: “I am watching you. I love you. Ganny.”
Well, Ganny, we have spent our lives watching you. We watched as you held babies living with HIV to dispel the stigma, as you championed literacy across our country, as you held Gampy’s hand when he got sick.
You always said that you were one of the luckiest women to ever live. But, Gans, I am filled with gratitude because you were ours. We are the lucky ones.
You did things on your own terms up until the very end. . . . And now you are reunited with the little girl I never knew who coined the phrase we still use: Ganny, we love you more than tongue can tell.
Love,
Jenna
I stayed up late, frantically flipping from channel to channel. I was unable to turn away, even when what I saw and heard hurt. All the while, I continued to write to Ganny, using my real memories of her as an antidote to these strangers’ theories and opinions. At last I fell asleep, only to dream of her.
GRIEF IS HARD, and I’ve learned this past year that grieving in public is excruciating. When the person you loved was famous, you must contend, while your pain is at its rawest, with strangers’ reactions.
Soon after Ganny’s death, a famous political operative wrote on social media that she was “a nasty drunk.” It was not just vicious, it was a lie. When she lost her child, in 1953, she went through a bout of depression, but not once in my life had I seen her drunk, nasty or otherwise.
As time passed, I saw a more positive side to grieving for a public figure—people you’ve never met before coming out of the woodwork to bring you comfort. Walking on the streets of New York City, I was stopped by strangers patting me sympathetically on the arm, grace in their voices as they told me how much my grandmother had meant to them. People I’d never met came up to me and said, “I loved your grandmother.” My raw sadness dissipated. Then came healing.
From the eulogies and obituaries, I learned things about her I’d never known, and what I discovered made me proud. She’d showed that she could be supportive of Gampy but also offer her own views without apology. She stood up for what she believed in. I learned that my grandmother was stubborn, but she was also able to change her mind when it mattered.
One article among the many that were published in the wake of my grandmother’s death appeared in April 2018 in The Atlantic, under the title “Barbara Bush Changed with Her Country.” The writer, Timothy Naftali, described a lunch he had in Maine with her and the presidential biographer Jon Meacham, during which the conversation had turned to the issue of transgender rights.
As First Lady, my grandmother was no stranger to the gay rights movement. At a time when many politicians were ignoring the plight of people with AIDS, she hugged babies and a man with HIV/AIDS in front of cameras. As a ninety-year-old woman, however, she told Timothy that she did not understand the big deal being made over Obama’s appointment of a transgender person, nor the fuss being made about Caitlyn Jenner.
Timothy explained to her how vital it was that transgender people have role models and could witness public acceptance. He pressed the case with her even though she seemed resistant. Later he wrote that on the way home he felt he’d gone too far in his efforts to persuade her. She was, after all, ninety. Why had he browbeaten her on this issue?
I understood his passion. I think often of a child from my first year of teaching. A spunky, funny eight-year-old whom I’ll call Sofia showed up at school in a frilly pink dress. As soon as her grandmother left after dropping her off, Sofia quickly ran into the bathroom to change into board shorts and a big T-shirt.
One day when the children were lining up, girls on one side, boys on the other, to go to the auditorium for a spelling competition, Sofia grabbed my hands and tearfully said, “Miss Jenna, I don’t feel like a girl. I feel like the boys.”
“Oh, Sofia!” I said, wiping away her tears. “You go ahead and line up with the boys! From now on, you go in whatever line you want and you wear whatever you want, okay? Now let’s go win this spelling bee!” Sofia happily got in the boys’ line that day and continued to do so for the rest of the year. If anyone in the class minded, I didn’t hear about it.
My colleagues and I met to make sure we were doing everything we could to help Sofia, but we didn’t have clear guidelines because it was 2004, long before the current conversation. The National Center for Transgender Equality had been founded only one year earlier. It would be years before transgender people like Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox, and Janet Mock entered the public eye.
I don’t know what happened to Sofia. It has been nearly fifteen years since I taught that class. I hope the winds of change brought understanding and acceptance. I pray that Sofia’s grandmother packed away the frilly dresses and fiercely loved the grandchild she had rather than the one she’d imagined. I’m glad teachers today know more than I did and have better language for describing the experience of children like Sofia, and that teachers now can point out successful transgender people thriving in the fields of politics, entertainment, sports, and more.
How glad I was to learn that Timothy Naftali made the case about transgender role models to my grandmother. I was sorry to hear that he felt he’d gone too far. But I was thrilled to read that he later received a message, via a note my grandmother sent to Jon Meacham, saying that she now believed that transgender people were “born that way”: “I so enjoyed the lunch and Tim won the argument. . . . Please tell him that at 90 I learned a lot from our lunch. . . .”
In that moment, I saw my grandmother as she really was. I recalled that her seemingly immovable ideas could yield, her unbreakable rules could be bent.
I thought about times I’d argued with her about politics. Why was I so insistent? Why had I challenged the long-held beliefs of a ninety-year-old woman? At that point, who cares who’s right? At times my dad had the same experience of arguing a point and then wondering why he hadn’t just let the matter drop. We could never resist, though, and that letter she sent to Meacham reminded me of why: because we knew she was listening. We knew she was open to change. Reading that article, I was reminded of the example she set. She taught me that you can always evolve, you can always be better.
I INVITED TIMOTHY Naftali, the author of that article, to my Today office at 30 Rock. It was a year after Ganny passed, and I was eager to hear more about their time together. I wanted to tell him what a comfort his article was to me, how it taught me something new about someone I knew so well and missed desperately.
We sat down in my office over cups of coffee and I asked him how he came to be there that October day in 2015.
Tim said, “Jon Meacham was at the end of the project,” meaning Meacham’s book, published that year as Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. “Jon said, ‘Well, you know, I want to go and say goodbye to the Bushes before they leave Kennebunkport for Houston. Why don’t you come with me?’”
Tim found my grandmother in the kitchen, clad in a velour tracksuit. He told me,
I kind of sensed that your grandmother wanted to talk. I didn’t know her. She wasn’t the only First Lady I had met in person. Having worked for the U.S. government, I was well aware of the signals that presidential people send about whether they want to engage or they don’t. I walked in and I realized from the beginning that she was open to talking. The first thing she said was about Michael Dukakis and how much she came to appreciate him when she learned about Kitty’s depression. I started talking to her about a book I was—and am still—trying to finish on John F. Kennedy. She was very keen about how I was going to deal with the private side of the Kennedy story.
Then, Tim told me, they moved to the screened-in porch where many vital family conversations had happened over the years. My grandmother’s lapdogs, Mini and Bibi, jumped up on the same sofa where I’d sat next to her each summer and discussed what had happened that past year.
Timothy told me he said, “May I pet the dog?”
My grandmother told him, “That dog bites. She’s very protective of George and me. If somebody tries to hug us or touch us, the dog will bite them.”
Tim said, “Mrs. Bush, there is Secret Service here. I assure you, I’m not going to hug you unless you invite me to!”
She told him, with a mischievous smile, “If I don’t like you, I’ll ask you to hug me so the dog will bite you.”
That’s my Ganny, I thought. Conversations with her could feel slightly ribbing, but Tim liked it and played along. He said they had a great dynamic.
My grandparents took Tim and Jon out to eat at a favorite restaurant of the family’s. There Tim brought up her work with HIV. He said, “You were really brave to go to that home.”
“I wasn’t brave,” she said. “I had read the research. I knew I couldn’t contract it from hugging.”
“No, politically you were brave,” he said.
She replied, “It isn’t courageous to do the right thing.”
Those words made me sit up straight. A year after she’d left us, here was a brand-new rule that Ganny lived by and wanted to communicate to others. You shouldn’t get special credit for doing what you should do in the first place. How typical of her, declining praise and insisting on humility and duty.
Tim became teary-eyed as he sat across from me, recalling their meeting. What struck him most was that she remembered every detail about the man she had met twenty-six years earlier at Grandma’s House, a home for people with AIDS. She told Tim about how his Catholic family abandoned him after he came out as gay and HIV positive. Soon Tim and I were both wiping away tears.
Of course, because my grandmother was the topic of conversation, there was laughter, too. Tim told me that at their lunch, when the waiter came by, he had ordered a glass of wine.
“What did you order?” my grandmother asked.
“The house Chardonnay,” he said.
She said, “I want to make sure, because recently we came with somebody who ordered a fifty-dollar glass of wine!”
When it came my grandmother’s turn to order, she double-checked with the waiter that Tim really did get the house Chardonnay. When the bill came, she checked again!
“That sounds like Ganny,” I told Tim, and smiled.
At that lunch, Tim told my grandmother that he had come out as gay later in life. When he told her this, he added that he wished he’d been able to confide in his own grandmother, with whom he’d been close. He told me he felt that in some way, talking about these things with my grandmother gave him a bit of closure. He added that he was happy when a mutual friend of theirs told him that my grandmother had recalled their lunch with great pleasure. “That lunch really changed me,” she said.
When Tim got up to leave my office, he said, “Now I’d like to ask you something. Do you feel like you ever changed her mind about anything?”
It was a good question, one I hadn’t really pondered.
I reflected for a moment, then replied, “I don’t know about that, to be honest. I do know that reading your article changed my mind in an important way. It made me see that my grandmother was able at ninety to change her mind. In this day and age, it seems as though people write one-hundred-and-fifty-word credos and then live by them until they die. No one ever seems to say, ‘Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about,’ or ‘Teach me more.’ I love that she was not like that. She wanted to learn. I hope I’m like her.”
I saw my Ganny vividly herself in Tim’s article—doting on her dogs, engaging in debates. To me, there was a lesson in it: if a ninety-year-old woman with strong views on everything could have an open dialogue on a touchy subject, we have no excuse for not keeping our minds open, too.
When my grandmother died and I lay there in bed watching the news, I felt a sense of dread. How am I going to go through this with all the other people in my family who are public figures? I wondered. She was the first of those closest to me to receive a period of public mourning, but she will not be the last. When my father dies, will “Bush insiders” weigh in on his character and policy decisions? Yes, they will, probably more divisively than they did when it came to a white-haired First Lady who once gave a speech at Wellesley.
When those terrible days come, I will remind myself of that conversation with Tim and of all those strangers who came up to me to pat my arm. Ganny taught us more than how to die with dignity; she also taught me how to mourn a loved one along with the rest of the world. First, there will be judgment and tears. Then, as time passes, there will be comfort. There will be grace.