Poise, Shotguns, and Grit

A Eulogy For My Grandmother

This weekend I delivered my first eulogy. It was for a person whose death affected me profoundly: My grandmother, Diana Dawes.

In her eulogy, I included the single sentence that has impacted me more than any other.

Diana Cooke Dawes (Haynes), Kirkwood, Missouri

I hope you find it as helpful as I do ↓

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I’m Micah Dawes Larsen,

Daughter of Bryan Dawes Haynes, granddaughter of Diana Cooke Dawes.

And I’m particularly proud of that middle name: Dawes. 

So proud, in fact, that when I had my son, I felt it one of the best things I could bless him with.  

Growing Up Dawes

To me and to my dad, our middle name is symbolic of the Dawes heritage that we grew up hearing about around the dinner table and reading about in history textbooks.

… so much so that, when my son was born, my dad lovingly recreated a family tree stretching back generations all the way to:

• William Dawes, who made the famed “Midnight Ride” with Paul Revere

• Rufus R Dawes, Union officer, Civil War hero of Iron Brigade, abolitionist, and US Congressman

• Vice President Charles Gates Dawes, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Dawes Plan after World War I

… Then: Diana — or as we knew her, “D” — Dad, me, and my son.

So, in our family tree, there’s a line of famous men I’ve heard about all my life. But it was really my grandmother who loomed large in my mind.

Given the opportunity to talk about her today, I want to tell you the single most important way she impacted me, which was, as my husband described it: Her high standards for people. She had this way about her that made you want to rise to them (the standards).  Her incredible grit and poise made her a memorable lady.

However, the parts of her I most admired were uninhibited and rough around the edges:

• On horseback or in the garden

• In the woods, doing trail maintenance at our beloved Nature Reserve

• At my wedding, where she stood in a Wyoming rainstorm and blasted clay pigeons out of the sky in her yellow raincoat

I saw that side of her most when we spent weekends at her beloved house on Marble Creek. The “Country Place,” we called it, the house that, when she bought it in the 1970s, was little more than a concrete slab in a cow pasture, but became a utopia in the woods where I always felt she was most in her element.

Countless times, I accompanied her on trips down to Maple House, where she’d put on old jeans and wade into the creek, float past water moccasins in an inner tube, and rev up a chainsaw or weed cutter with her singular determination. We built fires, did crossword puzzles, and ate pot roast by candlelight.

The “Country Place” was where she requested a “sawed-off” shotgun for her 85th birthday — for security purposes, of course — and befriended the local hillbilly gentlemen who politely called her “Miss Diane.”

That was where her true essence came out, and I saw this brave, fierce woman who was completely unafraid to go careening through old logging roads in an aging Chevy Blazer when she thought her grandchildren might be in danger. Who thought nothing of taking off in her Subaru with a mower and a dog for a few days of solitude, sleeping on the sleeping porch in a metal bed frame overlooking Marble Creek.

Those are some of the parts of her that I now hope to recognize in me. I hope that she passed on — not just in her name but — this fierce independence and stubborn grit I so admired and emulated. It said:

Don’t dwell on the past: Chin up and carry on.

She never complained, never relented, and very rarely asked for help. 

This might have been the unwritten Dawes family code, but I only ever heard her explicitly talk about it once.

D and I talked on the phone most weeks since I left home at 17, mostly about silly things I did, so I could make her laugh, but one conversation will stick with me the rest of my life.

The One Sentence I Will Never Forget

I was 34 weeks pregnant, and about to be induced to have my son prematurely after a month in the hospital on bed rest with preeclampsia. I was standing in a hospital room staring out a frozen window at a historic snowstorm, trying not to feel like it was an omen. I told her I was scared. I was scared to death.

At that moment, she boiled down our whole genealogical inheritance down to one sentence: 

“When I go through something hard, I always want to go through it in a way I’m proud of.”

That was her. That was D. And I like to imagine that it is characteristic of the many generations that came before us: In the face of the storm, hold fast. Go through it in a way you will be proud of later. 

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Our family members already know that on December 1st, 1959, D nearly died giving birth to my dad. She, like most of the women in my family, had a negative blood type, but this was before we had the RhoGAM shots my aunts and I took before going into labor, the ones that protect you from a potentially fatal blood type-mismatch.

D believed she passed into the afterlife, and spoke with great reverence of the experience she had, walking through blackness and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as she brought dad into the world. 

I have often wondered if she somehow knew that on February 10th, 2019, when we had that conversation over the phone, I was about to go through the same thing: Existing in a liminal space between life and death, trying to bring a son into the world.

I wondered if she was passing on the strength and grit I would need to get through it.  

And I’ve thought of that conversation countless times since. I don’t even know how many times now it has reminded me to rise to the occasion, not least of all the day that I drove like mad to get to her before she left this world.

I knelt at her bedside to pay my respects to a woman who has so shaped my life, knowing that I was going to go through losing her in a way that would make me proud. And her, too, I hoped. 

Diana Cooke Dawes was born on May 18, 1934, and died on May 31, 2023, in her bedroom surrounded by her family as music from her ukulele group drifted in the open door from her garden.

Today, her ashes and her portrait sit in my office next to photo of her sitting on a fence rail at a ranch in 1965 Jackson Hole, Wyoming, laughing and looking like she’s fresh off a horse (she was). In my weakest and my bravest times, that’s where I’ll choose to remember her.

And in her honor, continually try to rise to the occasion and live in a way she’d be proud of.