My mother’s parents had  the luxury of being a part of the middle class for only a very short time. It appeared for a very short time to be in their grasp, comfort in their declining years. My grandfather had a stroke and shortly after was diagnosed with emphysema, each took from my grandfather his health.

This tall, stoic, proud, independent man,  even the great depression which was not kind to my grandfather and grandmother failed to break him. Their life could be defined as one struggle after another. Still my grandfather stood as the proud patriarch of the family, for this there was no doubt, you felt it when in his presence.

It was in my grandparents last years that I was able to spend some time with them in their small cottage.   A small Social Security check was their sole source of income.  It was before Medicare which would help people like my grandparents be more comfortable as they aged.

For my grandparents this was their entire world at this point.  Small, clean with little for furniture. A kitchen table and old couch and coffee table are all I remember in that small single bedroom cottage.

It was that kitchen table, able to seat only four where I spent much of the time when I visited. But with four you had a game of pinochle, hearts, cribbage or any number of card games we would play when visiting. Grandma and grandpa played every game as it were a world championship.

My grandmother would hold her cards inches from her face. Cataracts were diming her view of the world. Her site was gradually being taken from her. My grandfather would get up to walk across to the bathroom, stopping when he reached the door, exhausted by the trek. No oxygen was available, no insurance to pay for it. This once powerful man would now labor for breath even while sitting at the table playing a wicked game of pinochle, still giving no quarter.

My grandmother once said all they had was their humor and pride and no one could take that away. Indeed that humor was always in evidence. Laughing was therapy and their humor was wicked.

My grandmother had been a British Home Child, brought at 10 years of age by ship with hundreds of others into Quebec, Canada. She was indentured to a clergyman’s family that looked at these children as ignorant and inferior and treated her as such. Six years late she was thrown out into the street with nothing but the clothes she had on.

She married a French Canadian Indian, it was an abusive relationship. His mother operated a brothel in British Columbia which my then widowed grandfather would frequent. She was a maid working for her mother in-law. When my grandfather returned to San Francisco with his two sons she followed with her two daughters.

The love that began while each met in the brothel was to last nearly 50 years. They were separated only with his death.

Grandpa was lying in his hospital bed, laboring to breathe and talk. My mother, father, aunts and uncles and many of the grandchildren including myself would take turns visiting their father and my grandpa for what would be the last time, as the Patriarch was passing out of this life. To my father he told him to open up the wall next to the kitchen table in the cottage, he would find a slot carved into the wall. He had been putting spare change into that small slot in the wall for a number of years.

He was saving for Grandma’s cataract surgery. He wanted her to have some light in her life, no longer seeing just shadows.

My father opened the wall and change fell out into the room. There was $1,600 of nickels, dimes and quarters. In death my grandfather was still that powerful, stoic patriarch who those years of love were in that wall. It would give back the gift of light for Grandma.