Loss of a Parent

Defining Grandma Bernice: In Memory of Bernice Preyer Swift, 08/04/1918 – 01/05/1946

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IMG_5764Her name was Bernice Preyer Swift. She was a mere 27 years old when a death certificate was completed on her time here. Her death left behind a daughter who had turned 7 only four days before her death, a younger 5-year-old daughter, and an even younger 3-year-old son to be parented by her bewildered husband, who already struggled to make ends meet as an uneducated laborer.
The story is told that she was apparently pregnant and not feeling well, and made it to John Gaston Hospital (the predecessor of Regional One), the city hospital where blacks were relegated for care in Memphis at that time, specifically, early January 1946. Unfortunately, she presented for care, and, despite demonstrating what must have been a tenuous state when she asked for help, that help never came. She persisted and waited for someone to provide care, but three days after coming in, she was dead.
That poor woman, who was notorious for being “camera-shy” and therefore sadly appears in no known family photographs, was my maternal grandmother, and her story is one that is held close to my heart. This year, August 4th marks what would have been her 100th birthday. There are many aspects of her story that are heart-wrenching, but what is particularly striking right now is that, despite the fact that she died over 72 years ago from pregnancy-related complications (eclampsia a.k.a. toxemia, given her death certificate listings), those of us in healthcare are fully engaged in conversations about concerning trends in maternal and infant death in Black women today.
Seven decades later, I find myself presenting statistics revealing that black women die from pregnancy-related complications at rates 3-4 times those of our white counterparts; what’s astonishing is that this health disparity is even worse than it was in 1850, when our ancestors were enslaved!  We are now actually having the hard conversations about the roles of racism and negative bias, which are the main issues implicated in this continuing trend.
It has always been this story of my grandmother that spurred my commitment to advocating for those who are underserved and marginalized, for my family knows too well the truth that Grandma Bernice died because she was poor and black in the Jim Crow South. Her story has been the reason I knew I would always want to expand my reach beyond the bedside and clinical care. She fuels the passion to be a megaphone for those people and organizations who are out on the front lines of our communities, working to see that the Bernice Swifts of the world are able to have access to health care, can find financial resources to buy medicines, can ensure that they are able to help support their households when they haven’t had a fair break with education, housing, or really any of the social determinants of health.
However, there are layers of how her premature death impacted our entire family. Her widow (my granddad) would almost never speak of his late wife and the pain and suffering of the experience of losing a young wife. This, coupled with the fact that we have no images of what our grandmother looked like, has always created a mystery of who she is and how we could best honor her legacy.  We only know bits and pieces that we have been able to find through stories of family members, like my grandmother’s brother and my mother’s favorite uncle, Uncle Booker.  Of course, I’m partial to his memory of her because he often said of me, “You are the spitting image of my sister Bernice!” Perhaps the fact that my birthday is separated by my grandmother’s by only 3 days has given me solace in feeling that we are almost kindred spirits, and perhaps there is almost a bit of Bernice reincarnate within my very being :-).”  My mother, her oldest child, also possesses memories of Grandma Bernice, but having just turned 7 years old only days prior to her death, she scarcely recalls subtleties such as her mother’s fear of thunderstorms and physical characteristics like jet black hair.  However, she also fondly recalls a time or two when she and her younger sister were vying for their mother’s attention when reciting alphabets and numbers.
Perhaps the memory that is most etched in our minds about Grandma Bernice is that her last words to her husband, Odell,  were “make sure you take care of my children.”  Once you hear this gut-wrenching emotional goodbye plea, you kind of feel like you know the essence of the character and spirit and just how beautiful this woman had to be, even without ever having laid eyes on her.
To this end of honoring her last wish, however, it was decided that her children would need to be cared for by their maternal grandmother, so off to New Jersey they went after saying goodbye at their mother’s funeral services. And this set in motion a sequence of events that led to multiple frequent moves among different family members in different cities and what must have been a tumultuous upbringing for my mother and her siblings.  In today’s standards, they most certainly would be considered to have been exposed to multiple adverse childhood experiences.  However, what their children and children’s children can proudly say is that they are nothing if not the poster children for RESILIENCE!
In all of this reflection on what should be a 100th birthday celebration, what remains is what would have been and what could have been for our Grandma Bernice. Some months ago, my sister and 2 female cousins agreed to embark on a journey with me (to complete the group of all four of Bernice’s granddaughters) on “Defining Bernice.”  This would mean trying to discover anything we could to learn more about the grandmother we would never know, and the mother our parents would barely, if at all, remember.  We have had enormous help with a distant cousin who is a skilled genealogist for our Preyer family (thanks, Dominique!) with gathering information on our family as a whole and adding context to the information we have on ancestry.com.  Unfortunately, we have had significant barriers to piecing together a picture of who our grandmother was because of the time in which she lived and the reality of how much our society didn’t value women and blacks enough back then to even care to document how they lived and died, or that they mattered at all.  For instance, her death certificate noted one location for her grave while her newspaper announcement had another.  In the end, neither site has grave markers, as it was not common for ‘colored’ people to have grave markers back then.  In attempting to find her burial site, neither cemetery exists any longer, and even if they did, there is no documentation of where she is buried, and there are no gravestones marking her final resting place.
Nevertheless, what we do have to define Bernice is our family spirit, and the story of 3 little children who lost their mother at a young and tender age, but triumphed over tragedy.  Today, those 3 children have children who have children; they have all almost tripled their mother’s years of life (nobody can be upset for ‘outing’ their ages, this can be discerned with simple math – lol.) Grandma Bernice’s widow remarried and had a family of his, hers, and theirs.
Those 3 children, however, went on to enjoy careers in teaching, the automotive industry, and with the postal service; they all were able to retire and have enjoyed traveling extensively in their Golden Years.  The picture above is a collage of the members of Grandma Bernice’s family; her 3 children are pictured together on a cruise in one of the pics.
Despite the troubling statistics with maternal death in black women, there have been obvious advances made since Grandma Bernice’s time.  Our parents endured Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, desegregation, and beyond.  In return, they were able to experience something that our ancestors and our grandparents would only have dreamed of in the election of our first black president.  Although I could now delve into the way the tide has changed since that momentous occasion, I will choose to go in a different direction.
Because of these changes, even the very hospital where Grandma Bernice died is different.  Regional One (born of the old John Gaston) is now more committed than ever to providing care to all people, regardless of ability to pay; in fact, a year ago, they launched an initiative aimed at addressing social determinants of health such as housing insecurity to mitigate the impact of these issues, as they contribute to healthcare outcomes more than actual clinical care. (As an aside, years ago, a highlight of my career was being an attending physician at this facility, where I got to care for patients who were newborns just out of the womb to those who were experiencing end-of-life care. The irony of this time and the fact that my grandmother had taken her last breath here associated with pregnancy was not lost on me; it was a full-circle moment of time.)
What a joy it is to think that, just 2 generations later, the lives of Grandma Bernice’s granddaughters are so very different.  Because we each carry a little bit of Bernice within us, she has seen access to education and advanced degrees in each and every one of us.  Through us, she walks into a couple of Fortune 500 companies every weekday, in one as an account manager for the most well-known pharmacy in the United States, and in the other, as a physician executive for the largest insurance company in the country.  She also works tirelessly as an educator for our young people, teaching the children who will lead our future in the very city where she lived her own short life, while a few hours away, she guides and counsels students with special needs through the educational system, while ensuring that the system is also meeting the students’ needs.
And, outside of work, she has traveled the world, sometimes as a part of multiple family members with her children and grandchildren together.  Though we are not where we need to be and we have had setbacks, she has been able to vote, have her voice heard, learn that “No” is a complete sentence, and that a woman’s place is inside the kitchen, outside the kitchen, and just about anywhere she very well pleases!  She has also been able to experience love and loss, joy and heartache, passion and apathy.
Each of her granddaughters has journeyed past the age of her untimely death at 27.  Although I would like to say that we live in a different time in which we are more empowered to be able to advocate for better service and better care if we present in that tenuous state that Grandma Bernice did back in 1946, I really cannot confidently make that claim.
However, what I can say is that, because we hold her story and her memory so close, we appreciate the legacy of who she is and who our parents are, and perhaps this is the gift we are receiving from her on what would be her 100th birthday. When our busy lives give us more opportunity, we will most certainly continue to try to hunt down any possible leads on pictures of Grandma Bernice.  I’m sure we will also continue to search archives in libraries and investigate any information we can to further define Bernice.
In the meantime, every day, we get to define who she is a little more by our own living. More importantly, we get to celebrate the fact that, somewhere up there, she knows “My children are just fine.”

MLK50 in Memphis, May Days, & a Maiden Moore

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April 4th was a highly-anticipated day for the Memphis community this year.  While our fair city became the somber backdrop of the remembrance of the assassination of Rev. King at the Lorraine Motel/Civil Rights Museum, I was busy doing something else; my mind was occupied with the best way to pay tribute to my late father during these festivities.

Back in 1968 while my mom was working and coming home to care for a toddler daughter, my dad was working and spending spare time involved in civil rights activities with various organizations.  As a matter of fact, when Rev. King came to the city on behalf of the sanitation workers who were courageously seeking fair wages and working conditions, my dad took up the fight and marched with them, although he was not a sanitation worker.  The fact that he believed in standing up for what was right, regardless of whether or not it directly impacted him is one of the values I most admired about him. My mother often says that my sister looks more like my dad, but that I act more like him; I tend to think that being active in social justice causes like this one is a characteristic that I inherited from him.

When the opportunity to march with the NAACP on MLK50 presented itself, I jumped at the chance to retrace my father’s footsteps with the organization to which he belonged as a lifetime member. Little did I know that we would file past the Universal Life Building that served as my dad’s employment base and as a bustling business hub for the black community for quite some time.  Left vacant for many years in downtown Memphis, the building had just been revitalized and reopened just prior to MLK50.  Above is a pic of my dad (he’s the tall one 🙂 ) with coworkers outside of the building in the 60s, and to the right are pics of the building as it stands today, with my pose in front of its antique signage.

Nearly 6 weeks after the remarkable event that brought numerous dignitaries, activists, and Common (he was the most notable figure for me, to my husband’s chagrin – lol) to Memphis, there has been a shift in focus to 10 days in May that will always hold major significance.  Those 10 days mark the period from my wedding anniversary to my late father’s birthday, and Mother’s day falls between them; talk about a roller coaster of emotions!  On one hand, I obviously love to re-live the one day when I got to be a princess (if you’ve never heard one of my favorite comedians, Jim Gaffigan, perform his stand-up on weddings, do yourself a favor and watch it on YouTube!) And marriage, although it is also a roller coaster, continues to be a beautiful institution to pay tribute; I’m planning on keeping my husband this week :-).  Mother’s day is priceless, coming on the heels of marital day memories, and words cannot begin to express the joy of the gift of being a mom.  On the other hand, though, as I look to this weekend and the 4th year without my dad’s presence on this Earthly side for his birthday, the void of his absence is heartbreaking.

And this brings me to the last point of this post. I happily took my husband’s name when I walked down the aisle nearly a decade ago.  However, because I have always been tremendously proud of the parents who raised me and the accomplishments I achieved with their support as a Moore, there was never a question that I would maintain my maiden name as part of my legal name. Sometimes that translates into people inadvertently adding a hyphen, which drives me bananas (I’ve just never cared for a hyphen for my personal use), and sometimes it means that people refer to me as the late actor Dudley Moore (which is actually just as fun and funny to me as people take it to be.)  Nonetheless, I’m pretty adamant about having my Moore continue to play a prominent role in my identity now more (Moore – ha!) than ever since my dad passed.  Now, integrated into my memories of my dad, MLK50, Memphis, and my personal May Days, the Maiden Moore is a critical part of my dad’s legacy.

How Apartheid Came to My Corner of the World, a.k.a. I Was Blessed with Remarkable Parents

/ ginamowill / 12 Comments

In a few weeks, Veterans Day will mark the second anniversary of my father’s death.  I become admittedly more emotional as more days like this-birthdays and holidays and anniversaries- come and go.   However, as I now reflect on his life and the influence my parents have had on the person who I am today, I find that I’m able to laugh and smile a little bit more each and every day since he left this Earth.

Now that I’m the parent of a preschooler, I realize that my husband and I are constructing our parenting style largely based on that of our own parents,  and based on our life experiences.  When I think of what an amazing job my mother and father did with raising us as responsible, caring, and hardworking individuals, I am humbled at the task ahead.  What has stood the test of time as the seminal event that characterized how my father and mother parented was a Christmas in the early 1980s.

My parents were hardworking people – my mom was a first grade teacher, and my dad was a human resources manager for the county government.  They were born and raised in a time of great distress for blacks in this country, when a poem that began ‘Southern trees bear strange fruit’ was relevant.  Jim Crow was a huge part of their every day life, even up until my older sister was born.  They could give firsthand accounts of developments in the Civil Rights movement, with my dad marching with Rev. King when he came to Memphis on behalf of unjust treatment of sanitation workers; they felt the impact of his assassination in their very own city.  With this background and experience with social injustice, it is no surprise that they recognized the importance of education, voting, volunteerism, and general civic involvement.  However, they also possessed the desire to understand different cultures and to foster that understanding in us.

So it was in this spirit that my father volunteered our family for an exchange program of sorts between the county government and some powers-that-be connected to South Africa.  And it came to be that during a holiday season circa 1984, we had a woman from Durban, South Africa, Gugu, come and stay with us.  We were so very mesmerized by everything she said or did.  She was equally as fascinated with us and our practices. For several days, she broke bread, went shopping, and regaled us with stories of life in South Africa.  In one case, she noted that my father always liked to sit in the recliner in our den; one day, my mother sat down in that same chair, and Gugu nearly fainted from upset!  She screamed at my mother, “Margaret, Margaret you cannot sit in that chair!!!!  That is your husband’s chair; you must get out.”  Needless to say, Gugu learned that, although my dad was the head of the household, that didn’t equate to the recliner only being reserved for his back-end!  My sister, mother, and I all learned that the liberties that we possess in this country as women were very different from those of our African sisters; Gugu’s distress at what she took to mean disrespect towards my father in occupying ‘his’ seat gave us a peek into the world that she would return to when this little experiment ended.   Stories like those abounded as we learned about the big differences in our cultures.  Christmas was so much richer that year because we shared it with our new friend from halfway across the world.  And I was 9 years old that year, so I had a full Christmas list of everything that I wanted, including the dolls that I had most begged for throughout the year.  This year was no exception, and I was thrilled because I had longed for a doll who could be fed with a bottle of water and she could use the potty; I mean…she came with her own pink, heart-shaped potty!  How cool was that?

When the holidays were coming to an end, Gugu packed up and got ready to leave.  I will never quite forget her departure, because my scarcely-crying mother shed actual tears, and the two of them seemed devastated that their new sisterhood was going to be broken.  This was long before low-cost international phone rates, the internet, and social media, so goodbye was truly going to be goodbye for these new sister-friends who had bonded in just a few short days, despite the major differences in cultural backgrounds.  As she prepared to leave, Gugu gifted my mother with handmade jewelry from South Africa; my mother put it in a sacred place in her dresser, and it was to be handled by nobody but her.  My parents gave her some items to take back and share with others about her experience with her American family.

And then…it happened.  While putting me to bed the night before Gugu’s departure, my parents talked to me and explained that Gugu was going home to her husband and little daughter, who was around my age.  They explained to me that Gugu’s family lived far away in Africa, where her little girl lived very differently than I did.  They tried to explain the basic concept of apartheid and oppression to me, and I think I got a rudimentary understanding and thought it all sounded very sad.  So then they said that they thought it would be a great and compassionate idea for me to gift one of my dolls to Gugu to take back for her little girl; after all, her daughter had never ever had a doll who was black and looked like she did.  I can’t remember exactly what I felt at that moment, but I do remember that suddenly, the story about Gugu’s little girl and how they lived in Africa didn’t sound that sad.  However, I knew that my parents wouldn’t suggest something like this if they weren’t going to make me do it, so I acquiesced, saying that they could give her the doll that I loved so much two years ago, who had grown out of favor since I had my new heart-shaped potty doll.  But. No.  That simply wouldn’t do, they said.  I needed to give away my lovely new doll, because they were not sending Gugu all the way back to South Africa with some old, raggedy doll I didn’t want anymore.  They talked to me about compassion, sacrifice, selflessness and how sometimes you have to let something that you really want go and give to others to be the best person you can be.  So they told me to sleep on it, but pretty much made it clear that I would be giving away my new, shiny drink and potty doll in the morning.  And that is exactly what happened the next morning; as my mother hugged and hugged and cried and cried with Gugu, I was devastated because I was losing the one doll I had coveted all year-long!

That Christmas remains one of the richest experiences of my life.  Years later, after apartheid had ended in South Africa, my mother received a phone call from Gugu.  My mother was getting ready for work, so they didn’t get to talk for long, but my mom learned that Gugu was divorced and getting to do many things to fulfill her dreams, and she sounded so very happy!  I have tried to find Gugu through internet searches and social media, but to no avail.  How I wish I could find out how her little girl is doing (and what she thought of that doll!) Little did she know that she played a critical role in the lessons of virtue that my parents instilled in me at a young age.

Of course now that I am an adult and a parent, I’m embarrassed that I whined so over a simple doll.  What I love to remember most is how skilled my mother and father were at parenting a young girl.  I really was raised by remarkable people, and I value them more since I can now use their nurturing and teaching skills as a yardstick to measure my own with my son.  So this year as the holiday season approaches, I will undoubtedly have moments of overwhelming sadness over missing my father; but I will also be grateful for the blessing of memories of that Christmas when they gave me the gift of thinking beyond myself.