Beverly Mae Western Forbis

life story

A tribute to Grandma

This piece was written by Hannah Hightman who is Beverly's granddaughter. Beverly was Hannah's daycare for all of her childhood. They shared a very close bond. Hannah read this at Bev's funeral.

Good bye Miss Beverly Mae

I spent a great deal of time at my grandmother’s house during the first several years of my childhood. She spoiled me to no end and for me her suburban home was a grand and glittering palace where I was waited on hand and foot, given whatever I wanted at the precise moment I wanted it, a luxury that I often find myself wishing I could still afford in my adult life. Atop a large cushion she had fashioned for me out of an obnoxiously neon felt fabric, I spent hours watching The Bear & The Big Blue House and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and in later years, highbrow programming such as TLC’s What Not To Wear and My 600 Pound Life.

At her house, I was introduced to culinary delicacies such as ham & cheese hot pockets, Betty Crocker’s microwave mug cakes, Stevia lemonade, and spray-on butter. She was an excellent cook, but found it hard to resist the novelty of whatever new-fangled culinary inventions lined supermarket aisles. Although I despised the squirt bottle butter, hot pockets are still a guilty pleasure of mine, and as an adult I admire both her campy palette and her constant search for futurism, even in places as mundane as the grocery store. And anyways, she taught me that a good meal is made not by the food itself, but by the people you share it with.

And she was always good company, in a way I envy to this day. She was a stellar conversationalist, and easy to talk to because she was excited about whatever you were excited about, liked whatever you liked, agreed with whatever you said. I used to think that meant she lacked strong convictions, but now I’ve met enough contrarians to know that it just meant that she liked people, and wanted to keep them around.

When the endless noise of the TV grew tiresome, my grandma and I would head outside to her backyard, which could transform into Neverland, or The Hundred Acre Woods, or whatever setting I had in mind on a given day. She was a wonderful playmate, and was never so out-of-touch with her inner child she couldn’t play pretend. Her favorite character to play was Eeyore, whom she embodied quite well, I think because she identified with a tired soul confronted with the boundless energy of youth, and a good actor always plays to their strengths. My mother told me that when she was a girl, all of the neighborhood children would gather by the flagpole in their front yard summer mornings, and grandma would come out with a notepad and pretend to be a waitress taking everyone’s breakfast orders. “She didn’t seem like the type of person to play along like that,” my mother once said. “But she was. She had imagination.”

I have never met someone who so enjoyed being happy the way my grandma did. I would say she seemed determined to wring joy out of the simplest of things, but that makes it sound too premeditated, when really it came naturally to her in a way it does to few people. She loved to see the daffodils bloom in the spring. She loved to compose bouquets of sweet peas for neighbors and friends. But her favorite flowers were Double Delight roses, which were named that because they were fragrant as well as beautiful, a fact she would always tell me in a sing song voice. She was a double delight person. Her joy was always compounded by the meaning she found in happiness itself. In the winters, on the shortest day of the year, she would pick me up from school with excitement in her eyes and proudly declare, “It’s the shortest day of the year!” In the summers, on the day of the solstice, I will always remember the way her head hung low as she bemoaned “It’s the longest day of the year” in a dreary voice that was nearly drowned out by the John Phillips Sousa marches she was so fond of playing on the radio. How wonderful to be so in love with life that the mere thought of days shrinking imperceptibly was worth lamenting.

Before I moved to New York, she told me that when she and her sister Hazel were younger, they would pretend to drive. “We always pretended to be driving to New York,” she said. “Of course, we never made it there, we just wanted to be going there.” She was always very proud that I had arrived at a destination she dreamt of reaching. When I made the journey across the country, everyone else in the family feared that my mild temperament would be shaken by the bitterly cold winter winds of the East Coast and the abrasiveness of New Yorkers, but Grandma never gave any indication that she doubted me.

On the plane I took from New York to California to see her one last time, I watched the Barbie movie, and wished I could have watched it with her. After all, she and grandpa had bought me my first Barbie, a milestone my mother feared would give me body image issues and a retrograde attitude towards gender roles (her views have since softened and she now cites the Barbie movie as one of her favorites). But really, I wanted to see it with Grandma because of a quote in the movie said by Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie: “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they have come.” I hope wherever she is now, she knows that my mother and I do look back at her often.