In Memoriam

 

Rosemary Bernard Groves 

Rosemary Bernard Groves, 62, 1954 Faculty Drive, Winston-Salem, died Sunday, Jan. 15, 2006. She lived with courage, intelligence, energy, wit and charm until her exuberance was cut short by early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Rosie received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southwestern Louisiana and master of education and doctor of education from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Early in her career, she worked as a social worker for the American Red Cross and managed a research project for Baylor College of Medicine. Later she served as assistant to the dean and personnel officer of Harvard Divinity School, assistant to the president of Guilford College and, briefly, manager of the Departments of Pharmacology and Physiology at Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University. She was preceded in death by her parents, Roger and Ethel Bernard; and a brother, Phillip Bernard. She is survived by her husband, Richard; a daughter, Carrie Gwynn and her husband, Joel, of Somerville, Mass.; two sons, Peter Groves and his wife, Stacy, of Alexandria, Va., and Jonathan Groves of Winston-Salem; a granddaughter, Simone Rosemary Gwynn; three sisters, Jeannine Leblanc of Lafayette, La., Irma Gonzales of Ed Araqua, Venezuela, and Ruth Philips of Aiken, S.C.; five brothers, Gordon Bernard of Nashville, Tenn., and Donald Bernard, James Bernard, Kevin Bernard and Michael Bernard, all of Lafayette; and numerous nieces and nephews. She was close to her husband's family, his late father, Earl Groves; his mother, Mary Frances Groves of Shreveport, La.; his sister, Sharon Fontaine and her husband, Steve, of Waco, Texas; their daughters, Leslie and Lauren; his sister, Sandra Timmons and her husband, Earl, of Shreveport; and their daughters, Kristi and Lori. Those who would like to do something in Rosie's memory may plant something, preferably something that blossoms; or make a donation in her memory to Wake Forest Baptist Church, P.O. Box 7326, Winston-Salem, NC, 27109; or both. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. today, Jan. 18, at Wait Chapel of Wake Forest University. A graveside service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 21, at Forest Park West Cemetery in Shreveport. The family will greet friends and family from noon to 1 p.m. at Rose-Neath Funeral Home, Shreveport, before the graveside service. (Vogler Reynolda Chapel)

A Tribute to Rosie
by Richard Groves

            On behalf of my family, I would like to thank you for being here, and for your many expressions of love and comfort in recent days and over the years.

One of my regrets is that many of you did not know Rosie before she became ill.  She was sick a long time – over sixteen years -- and during that time she was not the person some of us knew, loved, admired, and were sometimes amazed and often puzzled by. So today, while it is my task to help us celebrate her life, even while mourning its passing, the anguish and the suffering of much of it, it is also my task to introduce many of you to the woman we often call “the old Rosie.”

On first learning about Rosie people are often most impressed with her intelligence and her educational accomplishments, which were notable. Valedictorian in a parochial school, honor graduate at every collegiate level, from an undergraduate degree at an out of the way state school in Louisiana to masters and doctors degrees from Harvard. But hers was an unostentatious intelligence.  It was disguised by a disarming freshness, curiosity, playfulness, sense of adventure and openness to anything new, qualities I think Carrie inherited from her mom.

For example, one Saturday Rosie came back from a yard sale very excited about one of her purchases, a brand new, never been worn yellow T-shirt.

“I got it for a quarter,” she said proudly.

“How can you buy a new T-shirt for a quarter,” I asked, “even at a yard sale?”

She turned the shirt around and across the back, printed in large block letters, was the name “Wanda.”  She loved that shirt.  She wore it everywhere.  She wore it for years, until it became limp and threadbare. She especially loved it when people mistakenly, but understandably, assumed her name was Wanda.  “No,” she would explain, “my name is Rosie. I just got a real good deal on the shirt.”

Rosie was an expatriate Cajun who couldn’t stand Cajun music – she called it by its derogatory South Louisiana name: chanka chank.  She regretted not having learned to speak French at home as a child, but she believed that you should eat rice every day and that everything tastes better with cayenne. She was the embodiment of the unofficial Cajun motto: “Laissez le bon temps roulez.” (Let the good times roll.) And, yes, she could make a roux.

She loved the symphony, the opera and ballet.  One day of the week was set aside for Rosie and her music -- Saturday afternoon at the Met. She would crank up the volume on the sound system and get out her broom and mop. She called it “music to clean the house by.” Sometimes I accompanied her to the symphony. Mostly she went with friends. Over the years she got me to one opera and one ballet.  I have regrets but that isn’t one of them.

Rosie had the rare ability to laugh at herself. It served her well in the early stages of her illness.  It became one of her lines of defense against the coming darkness. Like the time she told an old friend, “Dann, I think I’m losing my memory. Did I tell you that?” When she realized what she had said, she burst out laughing.

One Saturday we were waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store while the woman behind the counter tried unsuccessfully to scan an item. Finally, she gave up and asked me if I knew the price.  I didn’t.  Rosie calmly told her.  By that time she was no longer driving because she couldn’t find her way home, and she couldn’t remember which day to come to church.  Yet she remembered the price of a grocery store item selected at random.  I stared at her in amazement. She nudged me in the ribs with her elbow and said, “Stick with me, kid. I’ve got the whole store memorized.”  Then she giggled.

The truth is that numbers had always stuck in her head, which must be where Peter got his love for math.  I can’t think of any other explanation.  Certainly not from my end of the gene pool. We discovered one evening over dinner that Rosie knew the phone numbers of upwards of seventy-five church members, family members, friends and neighbors and didn’t know she knew them because she had not tried to learn them.  They just stuck there.

One of the popular clichés of recent years is to “think outside the box.” It has become worn, but as with all clichés there is truth at the heart of it. (Speaking of clichés, Rosie never got one right her whole life. Among family and friends, Spoonerisms became Rosieisms. My favorite was, “That was the straw that brought the camel back.”) Most of us get stuck in habitual ways of thinking.  We have to be prodded to “think outside the box.” But with Rosie, first you had to convince her that there was a box.  Her mind never worked the way mine did.  I could never predict what she would think about anything or what route logic would take to lead to some of her conclusions. 

For example, she didn’t believe in extended warranties, as a salesperson for Sears found out shortly after we were married. We had gone to the store to buy a refrigerator, our first major appliance. After we found one we liked, the unsuspecting salesperson asked if we would like to purchase an extended warranty. Which gave Rosie an opportunity to give her “why I don’t believe in extended warranties” speech.

“The way I look at it,” she said, “an extended warranty is a bet between you and the manufacturer. The manufacturer says, ‘I bet you $100 that this refrigerator I just sold you for $500 won’t last more than five years.’ And if you don’t buy the extended warranty it’s like you’re saying, ‘I’ll take that bet, because I think your refrigerator is better than you think it is.’ But if you don’t have confidence in your own refrigerator, why should I buy it in the first place?”

A friend in Texas told me last summer that she used to love to listen to Rosie and try to figure out what steps her mind was skipping.

A couple of years ago an emergency room doctor tried to push me to make an end of life decision I wasn’t ready to make. I had never seen her in my life, but she was trying to get me to send Rosie back to the nursing home without treatment, essentially to die.  And she wanted me to make the decision standing there in the ER. “You have to think about what your wife would want,” she said in that condescending doctor tone of voice that makes you slap somebody. I think she thought she knew what Rosie would want.

“We talked about that a long time ago,” I said, “before she got sick. I asked her what she would want me to do if she were in a condition where she could not make a decision for herself and there was no hope of recovery. She said, ‘I would want you to do what is best for you and the children. I won’t know, and I won’t care.  But you will have to live with the decision for the rest of your life.’”  

When the time came, we remembered what she said.  It put an added burden on us when we might have preferred to put it all on her. But it acknowledged that we, the family, had legitimate concerns.  It gave us permission to consider them.  And it shut the doctor up.

You never had to encourage Rosie to think outside the box.

She had the enviable ability to be totally honest with people without making enemies.  Like the time Henri Nouwen, the noted Catholic priest, theologian and writer, complained to her that the faculty boxes in the divinity school post office were too small for the large amount of mail he received from around the world every day.  He was enormously popular.  His public lectures at Harvard were packed.  School busloads of nuns came to Cambridge from New Hampshire and Vermont.

He was a dear, sweet man, but he had a need to be taken care of, and one thing Rosie was not good at was taking care of people who had a need to be taken care of.

“Why don’t you go to the grocery store,” she suggested, “and get a box and ask the post office workers to put the extra mail there.”

“That’s a good idea,” Nouwen said. “Would you go to the grocery store and get a box for me?” 

Rosie’s response went through the divinity school at something approaching the speed of light. It became part of her legend. “Henri,” she said, “I’m not one of your nuns. Get your own box.”  They became close friends.

Rosie’s first job at Harvard was assistant to the dean of the divinity school.  And, yes, it is true that she got the job because she got out of the elevator on the wrong floor. She had gone to Harvard Square to enroll in a computer course in a community program – it was the beginning of the Reagan era and, as she said, social workers like herself were dropping like flies – but when the elevator door opened she was standing in front of the personnel office of Harvard University.  She walked out with a job, and eight years later she had a doctor’s degree. “But it wasn’t as if I had a plan,” she used to say. “I got off on the wrong floor.”

The dean of the divinity school had the reputation of being a tough administrator.  “You haven’t been dressed down,” a staff member told me, “until you’ve been dressed down by the dean.”  But something happened one day that made me think perhaps he had met his match in his new assistant.  He and I were talking casually at a social event when he spotted Rosie across the room, engaged in a lively conversation.  The look that came across his face was a combination of wonder, bewilderment, and resignation.  He said, almost under his breath, “I bet she’s hell to live with sometimes.”  I took that to be a throwing in of the towel.

Truth be told, it wasn’t always easy to be married to Rosie.  She was the most honest person I’ve ever known. I never knew her to lie, not once. I never knew her to alibi or blame or refuse to accept responsibility that was hers.  And she expected everyone around her to be equally honest.  That would be me.

Rosie was naturally empathetic, a trait that Jonathan picked up.  She believed that people who suffer develop a sixth sense, an acute awareness of other people’s pain.  She believed she had that. 

Bob, our friend and fellow church member, was dying. Heart problems, diabetes. I went to the hospital to visit him. Rosie, who was already well into her illness, went with me. When we entered his room, Bob recognized us and quickly pulled the sheet up across his chest. But when he did, the sheet slipped off his left foot, which was as shiny and black as a creosote post, victim of advancing diabetes. 

I had been in hospital rooms and intensive care units for twenty-five years, and I had seen a lot of things, but I had never seen anything like that. I froze. I didn’t know what to do. The kindest thing would have been to place the sheet over his foot, but at the moment it seemed to me that I should proceed as if I hadn’t seen anything, which is what I did. Standing next to his bed, I turned slightly toward Bob and began talking with him. The panicked look on his face slowly went away, but was soon replaced by another expression, one I couldn’t make out – disbelief, astonishment? I turned slightly to my left and out of the corner of my eye I saw Rosie, who was standing by my side, gently massaging that blackened foot.  I managed to keep my wits about me enough to suggest that we pray. Bob seemed to appreciate the offer. When I finished my prayer, I spoke to him for the last time. As I turned to go, Rosie leaned down and kissed Bob’s dying foot.

When we stepped into the hallway, I was speechless.  Sensing my bewilderment, maybe even my disapproval, Rosie said, “He was ashamed. I wanted him to know there was nothing to be ashamed of.” She turned on her heels and left me standing there.

“We do the hard thing,” she used to say to the children when they complained about some unpleasant but necessary task.  There was the sound of pride in it and resolve. She did a lot of hard things in her life.  She left home when she was 15, ran away from a painful situation that she was powerless to change.  She ran to a beloved aunt who took her in and, as Rosie said, “became a mother to me.”  Rosie said many times, “Aunt Lynn saved my life.” 

But five years later Rosie began to have serious religious doubts and found it necessary to leave the Catholic Church, which had been her spiritual home all her life.   More than her spiritual home, for South Louisiana was provincial in those days, the early 60s.  To be Cajun was to be Catholic.  To leave the Church was tantamount to rejecting one’s culture, and one’s family. So when she left the Church, she moved out of Aunt Lynn’s as well.  She had become a source of shame to the one whose love had saved her. 

The truth matters, and sometimes you have to pay a price for it.  Rosie always believed she did the right thing when she left the Catholic Church, but she always had regrets.  She missed the dignity and mystery of worship. “’Amazing Grace’ is wonderful,” she said, “but it’s not the ‘Sanctus.’” Henri Nouwen, her colleague and friend, offered early morning worship in a small chapel in the divinity school dorm. He called it “the liturgy.” He said if he called it the mass, which is what it was, he couldn’t allow Rosie, a Protestant, to participate fully.  She loved him for that.

Rosie’s Cajun-Catholic heritage remained rooted somewhere deep in her soul. George McCrae, a Jesuit biblical scholar, became acting dean in Rosie’s last year at Harvard, the year she spent there when the boys and I moved to Winston-Salem. But shortly after becoming dean, Fr. McCrae died unexpectedly.  His casket lay in state in the Braun Room, a dark, paneled room where the portraits of former deans dating back to the 19^th century are displayed. The funeral was scheduled for Monday. On Friday evening after work, Rosie returned to her room in the Jewett House across the street. (How she and Carrie ended up as the sole occupants of the dean’s three story mansion that year, free of charge, is a story that will have to wait for another time.) That night Rosie looked out her second-floor window directly down into the Braun Room. It just didn’t seem right, she told me later, that no one was sitting up with Fr. McCrae.  That wasn’t the way it would be done in Broussard. So she dressed and went back across the street to the empty, darkened divinity school.  If no one else would sit up with Fr. McCrae, she would.

But when she settled into a chair in the semi-lit room, facing the casket, she got an eerie feeling that she was not alone.  She turned and was startled to see John Scannell, the building superintendent, a life-long Catholic, sitting in the back corner.  “It just didn’t seem right,” he said. “Somebody should be here.” So Rosie and John Scannell took turns sitting up with Fr. McCrae that night, and the next, and the next.  As far as I know, they never told anyone.

The only thing I ever saw back Rosie down was Alzheimer’s Disease.  It terrified her.  She couldn’t talk about it. She wouldn’t read about it.  

Shortly after I was given the likely diagnosis, I asked a friend, who had seen his wife begin the walk down that long lonely path several years earlier, what it was going to be like.  He said, “One day you will realize that you are suffering more than she is, and you will be glad.”  That day comes at long last. After the nightmare years of not being able to follow conversations, of making lists of things to do in a desperate attempt to get control of her life and then forgetting that she had made the list, of wandering lost in her own neighborhood and then in her own home, that day comes.  First, the sparkle disappears from her eyes, then the recognition, then everything. Like lights being turned off in the house across the street, one by one, until finally the house is dark.  The terror has ended. The suffering is mercifully over.  And if the price you have to pay is a puzzled expression on her face when she looks at you, you pay it gladly.

Over the years people often asked me, “How do you handle it?” as if I were privy to some great secret.  I tried to have an answer, but it was hardly a secret. I told them about human frailty and divine grace.  Sometimes I quoted a passage from William Barclay’s commentary on the Gospel According to Matthew. “We are still alive, and our heads are still above water.  Yet if someone had told us that we would have to go through what we have actually gone through, we would have said it was impossible.  The lesson of life is that somehow we have been enabled to do the undoable and bear the unbearable and to pass the breaking point and not to break.”

And I told them about you: how, when you heard how hard it was to care for Rosie at home, you divided up the days among yourselves and made sure that one of you was there every day, all day, six days a week, month after month, so I could go to the office and Jon could go to school; how, when you found out that the expense of institutional care was going to be devastating, you set up a special fund, and how over two and a half years you contributed more than $50,000. I told them, “I don’t see how you can make it without people who love you and take care of you.”

So, to the friend who invited me to spend Saturday nights at her house and get a good night’s sleep so I could preach on Sunday morning while she stayed up most of the night taking care of Rosie – thanks.

To the friends in Waco, Texas, where I was pastor twenty-five years ago, who participated in the 2003 Alzheimer’s Association Memory Walk, walking behind signs that read “Rosie’s Rovers” and “In honor of Rosie Groves” – thanks.

To the retired minister who told me, “I’m going to put a sermon on the corner of my desk; if you get up some Sunday morning and you just can’t make it, give me a call; I’ll be ready” -- thanks.

To the Herring Hat Ladies who faithfully visited Rosie and who left tiny straw hats pinned to ribbons as tokens of their dedication -- thanks.

Thanks to all our friends.  Thanks be to God.