An Email from MamaTessie

My paternal grandmother, MamaTessie, passed away in December of 2007. She was a smart and strong minded person and I like to believe that I inherited some of my better traits directly from her.

One of the real regrets I have in life is that I did not get to introduce her to her youngest great-granddaughter, my Isabel. She was born in the summer of 2007 and too young for us to make the drive down to New York where MamaTessie lived. My grandmother then moved to Maryland just weeks before she passed away, and that further complicated the visits. We had planned on driving down for Passover at my aunt's house, also in Maryland, the following spring, and seeing her then. But by then she was gone.

So she never got to meet Isabel, who was named after her late husband Isadore (my PapaIzzy).

Shortly before she passed away my grandmother, 87 years of age, sent me an email. From her very own brand new gmail account, mamatessie@gmail.com. It was not a long text but it was sweet. She had seen recent pictures of Nathan and Isabel and video of my two year old son singing the ABCs. It pleased her to know how well he had learned his alphabet. She asked for the web site addresses where I posted the kids' pictures so that she could go to those pages at her new assisted living facility. I enthusiastically emailed her back and gave her the latest news as well as those addresses.

I did not save the email she had sent me. For whatever reason. Oh, how I wished I had.

I've spent the better part of the last two years trying to recall what was in that note. Then it occurred to me that her Gmail account was likely still intact, and that if I could guess her password then I could go in and see the email she had sent me.

My first guess, PapaIzzy, was not it. My second guess, an amalgam of my father's name and his brother's name that their cleaning lady used to refer to both of them by as children in the 1950s, was correct. I was able to go in and read the email again and forward myself another copy of it.

This one I will be saving.