Maya and Grana
My grandmother, Barbara “Grana” Antell Silber, died on March 11, and last Sunday I voted early and ranked Maya Wiley first in the mayoral race in her honor. Let me explain why, by way of the remarks I shared at Grana’s memorial Zoom in March.
I had the great fortune of having Grana as a formative influence in my life not just when I was young but during the four-plus years after college when, as she used to put it, I lived in her study.
Those days had a rhythm that today I recall fondly, though it bothered me at the time. I would return home from another daily slog at the failing publishing company where I worked, and Grana would be waiting in her chair at the kitchen table, the PBS News Hour on in the background and Moroccan chicken or pesto pasta on the stove, ready to regale me with the minutiae of her day.
Sometimes she’d want to discuss a young couple she had seen in her genetic-counseling practice. Other times it was the vicissitudes of alternate-side parking or commuting on the № 5 bus. Or it was an old colleague or distant cousin with whom she had made contact by way of Facebook or 23andMe.
Many of her stories, I’m afraid to report, had no manifest theme or lesson. And I would tell her as much. To me they were a blur of proper nouns and hazy, half-described lineages. So-and-so whose cousin went to Fieldston, “the man from the Berkshires,” “the doctor with the funny name.”
The overarching subject of these stories, to the extent there was one, was coincidence — the surprising and mysterious ways the world around her had arrayed itself, all the connections that had no obvious reason to be there but were. This, I suppose, was what would fascinate a biologist. Most all of these stories ended the same way… “So, it’s a small world.”
But I was never persuaded that the world was so small. For one thing, her world was a large one. She could find connections easily because of the richness of her life. She had traveled the world widely and had a long and varied career. She had four children and six grandchildren, all of whom have done interesting and unusual things.
Also, if you knew Grana, you know that some of these connections came through brute force. Whenever she met someone, she took careful note of where they were from, where they had gone to school, what their parents, children, and partners did. (As I had just finished an English degree, this called to mind the world of Edith Wharton, although I now recognize that this, too, was the biologist’s approach: Kingdom, phylum, class… and so on.)
She would keep inquiring until she had found a connection. For instance, she would often inform me of people she met who regularly watched Jeopardy… but didn’t recognize me from my appearance. How could the subject possibly have come up?
But some events this year have made me reevaluate my skepticism. My partner Jessica and I got to her apartment in the afternoon on Wednesday, March 10, the day before she died, and although she seemed tired she was fairly lucid. She asked how things were going, asked what we thought of Meghan Markle’s interview.
And then a city political campaign called the house, and we got to talking about the mayoral race. She said, oh, I like Maya Wiley — a civil-rights attorney she knew from her MSNBC appearances. I told her I was supporting another candidate.
Then Grana started to slow and fog a bit and asked for her purse, and, when she got it, she started digging in there aimlessly. We asked her what she was looking for and she said she was looking for Maya Wiley. And I thought for a second she was joking — Grana did not make mental mistakes — but then I realized she was losing it.
She asked me if I knew Maya Wiley from school, and I said, oh, no, she’s older than I am.
Mentally and physically Grana slipped further away from there, and within 20 hours, she was gone. Her statement of support for Maya Wiley was the last coherent thought I heard from her.
About half an hour after she died, the next afternoon, all of the family members who had come to her apartment were in the front two rooms, making the calls and arrangements that immediately follow a death. My uncle Michael’s phone rang — a New York number he didn’t recognize. Thinking it might be the funeral home or some as-yet-unaware relative, he answered, and put it on speaker.
“Michael!” a too-friendly-for-the-occasion voice cried out on the other end. “It’s Maya Wiley!”
It turned out she was calling for a donation. We told her she just had lost a supporter. But that serendipitous moment would find her some others.
As Grana would say, it’s a small world.