Shirley Holzman Grindrod Durkin, 1922 - 2001

Today is my mom's birthday. She would be 85 years old. This photo is from when she graduated from nursing school. Don't be fooled by the Trixie Belden demeanor. She was a complex person and I had a complicated relationship with her.

Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, who met in Milwaukee. They owned a grocery store. At some point they moved north to Eagle River, Wisconsin where her dad was a wallpaper hanger. (We had an enormous pair of shears in our kitchen that was a relic from that time.) Then they moved back to Milwaukee.

Her dad was a radical. He joined the IWW and the Communist Party. He also did jail time as a war resister during WW1. He associated with the likes of Eugene Debs and Ammon Hennesy. He also suffered from depression and was probably bi-polar, which of course went untreated at that time. He had a violent temper. I suspect my mom carried the scars of that her entire life.

My mom joined the Young People's Socialist League (YPSLs) as a teenager. She was good friends with a youthful Frank Zeidler, who became Milwaukee's Socialist mayor. When WW2 came, her childhood friend Nate Sadowsky (another YPSL) became a conscientious objector. He was stationed in Luddington, Michigan with a handsome young man from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin -- John Grindrod. Romance blossomed, and my mom would take a ferry across Lake Michigan on the weekends to visit him.

They married. My dad went to medical school and they had 4 kids in pretty quick succession. Like good liberal Unitarians (Jewnitarians, as she loved to say,) they adopted a 5th child from Korea, and then -- surprise! -- had me. 6 kids, the perfect 1950's family. Except that my mom inherited her dad's depression as well as his temper. Thankfully she did not have the extreme mood swings, but my overall recollection of her is that she was grumpy most of the time. She had very little help from my dad and she felt pretty stifled and isolated. There was verbal abuse. There were suicide attempts.

As a young adult I was very, very resentful. At some point, not long before she died, I had an epiphany that really helped me heal. I had spent most of my adulthood declaring, "I do NOT want to parent the way that my mother did!" The big AHA came when I realized that my mother did not want to parent the way she did!! And my mantra became "I want to be the kind of parent my mother wanted to be."

My dad died in 1996, and my mom was lost without him. She continued to live in their house, but her memory slipped and we kids began discussing what to do. And then something happened. She went to a YPSLs reunion and became reacquainted with one of her old comrades, Bob Durkin. They married when she was 79 years old, and she was the happiest I had ever seen her! It was such a blessing (even when she called one day and casually mentioned how happy she was, and it "wasn't all about the sex." NOooo -- TMI!!!) She developed nonHodgekins lymphoma and died just after their first anniversary.

For all of her demons, my mom was an amazing woman. She was the most generous woman you'd ever want to meet, taking numerous people under her wing from international students at the university to 3 children whose mother went to the 1968 Poor People's March on Washington to mentally ill people off the street. She profoundly shaped who I am today.

A few more memories:

She took a trip to the Russia in 1966, part of one of the first groups of Westerners allowed into the Soviet Union. I still have the little nesting dolls she brought back.

She dearly loved little kids, and faithfully volunteered twice a week in my Pre-K classroom one year.

My nephew acquired a pet pig named Galahad. Right after my mom's death, I was looking through her Rolodex for people to contact, and on my sister's card she had written not only the names of all the family members, but Galahad as well.

She and my youngest daughter had a special relationship. One of the last times I saw her, we were pushing her around the grounds of the nursing home. She was very sick, emaciated, and in pain. My daughter ran up to her with an acorn cap, and my mom put it on her own fingertip like a little puppet and made it talk to Grace. That was the kind of mom she wanted to be.

When we were writing her obituary we wanted it to reflect her unique world view, so it opened with "Shirley Holzman Grindrod Durkin died after a long and courageous battle with authority ..." and that about sums it up.

I miss her.