My name is Lauren McGuire. I am Jean Wright’s granddaughter.
On behalf of my father, Dan, our family would like to thank you for coming today to honor my grandmother’s life. When I was a baby, Jean tried to get me to call her Nana. Nina is what I came back with, and she has been Nina ever since. I was in high school before I knew that Nina was a proper name and not another name for the office of grandmother.
My Nina wasn’t what you would call a religious person. Nevertheless, as I was holding Nina’s hand the other day, I thought about a story from the Bible that made me think of her.
In the bible, the disciple Matthew tells about a time when Jesus was being questioned by the Pharisees. Pharisees were the religious big shots. They didn’t care for Jesus, and they were forever giving Jesus a hard time. In Matthew chapter 22 we read,
35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[c] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[d] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
When I think of the life of Jesus and the example of Jesus, I always think of this verse. What Jesus calls us to in this life, what Jesus invites us to, his command, was love. And my Nina did that.
My Nina was born on December 20, 1924. She was a child when her mother died in a drowning accident at the beach. Miraculously, Nina always loved the water. Her father, a logger I think, sent her to live with her grandmother, a woman who referred to the kids collectively as “those nasty chillin.” Nina said her grandmother loved her and that people in those days didn’t hug or kiss or say I love you. I remember kind of looking at her sideways when she told me that. My Nina hugged and kissed and made over us to the point of silliness. In my mind, that’s what grandmothers did. Nina went on to be more or less raised by her Aunt Dora. In 1942, she met a handsome Naval airman and just shy of graduating high school, decided it would be best to elope with him.
Jean and Bob’s adventures took them all over the country from Florida to Texas, California to Alaska, New Jersey to Mississippi where they settled and raised my dad. Along with my Pawpaw, Nina collected friends like coins keeping them tucked in her pocket to remind her of their presence. She fed them a steady diet of stories and cakes, cocktails and jokes, building another family out of time and place. Some of her friends came to her door hungry for laughter and a good time. Some came thirsty for my Nina’s brand of grown up mother love. No matter who showed up, Nina threw the door open wide and always said the same thing, “Come in this house!”
Seeing her life through my own adult eyes, I can see why Nina would collect friends and stitch them together into a quilt of friends and family to pull around her and keep her warm and safe. It didn’t much matter if your square was super close to her heart or further away, there was always room for you under that blanket. By the time she got to be an older woman, that blanket was not easily discarded. In the last ten years, we have tried everything to get her to move closer to us. We have begged, bribed, and bargained. There were no sacred cows in this game. I personally used any and every chip I had including my children. Always an incredibly tenacious person, Nina resisted our every temptation. She wanted to live life on her own terms and she did. That’s not a bad legacy to leave behind. But really, I don’t think she could bear to leave her friend family here in Meridian. And therein lies the other legacy she leaves us with love your people, whoever they are, and love them well.
I am an especially private person, and grief is not an easily accessible emotion for me. Grief and I have an understanding. I allow the emotion free reign, but generally only when I am alone. When we arrived in Mississippi to say goodbye, her room was full of people. Those people, friends who had been very much family, had come to say goodbye and grieve in their own ways, and in the face of their grief, I felt my own grief abandoning me. But then those gracious folks gave me a few private moments with my Nina.
I held her hand, and because I couldn’t stomach yelling, I got close to her ear and talked to her. I remembered being a young child on a dock, bugs playing across the water. My Nina held out a worm, showed me how to set the hook and then helped me cast my line into the water. I caught catfish and little brim which my Nina proudly cooked for dinner. So, I told her, “Thank you for teaching me how to fish.”
I remembered going to the coast when we were little. We stayed in this sweet townhouse where we spilled onto the beach all hours of day and night to play. Nina taught me how to body surf. She and Pawpaw showed us how to catch sand flees and generally drug us around the gulf for the better part of a week. So, I told her, “Thank you for taking me to the beach when we were kids.”
Then the memories started coming in earnest. Near daily phone calls for years. Visits when we were children and then when I was a young adult, then newly married, then a mother with children of my own. Every time that back door would swing open and she would holler, “Come in this house!” Biscuits and gravy breakfasts. Pound cakes and chocolate chip cookies. So I told her, “Thank you for loving me well.”
Love is a gift, no matter how it is served up, and based on the amount of people who ate at her table, Nina showed me that there is always room for more love. One thing I learned from watching her – it is interesting to see who life sets down beside you and invites you to love.
I looked at that woman who had loved me so well and I told her, “We are going to be just fine. You are free to go. Pawpaw is waiting for you. And so is Jesus, and he absolutely delights in you.” Later, I was able to hold Nina’s hand while she walked through the doorway of this life to the next. It was a holy space. Sacred. We stand at that threshold only two times in life – at birth, and then again at death. I was glad to be with her. I imagined a heavenly house with a screen door swinging wide open and big voice, full of love, shouting at her. “Come in this house!”
Lately I am convinced that The Church is not a building or place. It is people. It is us. We are the hands and feet of Christ, God with us, to each other. It is our charge to love well. Jean Wright, my Nina, did that. She loved us well, and we will miss her. We will lament and cry and sit in much sadness at the loss of her in our everyday lives. That grief is right and good and what God made our bodies to do. Over time the tears will come less often. We will remember her, and there will be joy. Because where there is love, there is also joy.
