Katharine Fontaine Heath 1914-2009

On New Year’s Day I sat down to write a New Year’s post, recapping 2008 and voicing my hopes for 2009. It started out as a very upbeat post. Unfortunately, it remains unfinished. I haven’t been able to muster the positivity that I felt on January 1, instead I’ve spent the last 12 days feeling very sad.

If you know me in real life, you are likely to have heard me mention my “adopted” grandmother, Katharine Heath. Katharine was an incredible woman and friend to my family, who at the age of 94, passed away quietly in her home late Saturday night. Her health had been declining for several years and we have spent the first two weeks of the year holding vigil over her her. Below is the letter that I wrote to her a week before she passed away and which I will read at her funeral service on Saturday. I hope I can hold back my tears.

January 3, 2009

Katharine. I believe that I can be honest and say that I know that you are getting very close to letting this world go. I am sad for myself and for all of the people who know and love you; I don’t think that any of us can adequately prepare for the hole your absence will leave in our lives. My tears are selfish, I know that you are ready to go and I do take some comfort knowing that you are still in your little house and will be able to stay there until the end. I know that you are right where you want to be. There are a few things I want to be sure that you know and that you know I will always remember. You have done more to shape my life and the person I am than anyone second to my parents. There has never been a time in my life when you were not there.

You taught me how to build a fire, a log cabin out of kindling, lit with a newspaper spliff.

You always spoke to me as a grownup, never once can I recall you babying me although I know you spent countless midnight hours walking me to sleep on you front porch. One of my earliest memories is of a humid night on your balcony watching heat lightening in the distance.

You made sure that I believed in, and knew about, the magic of the natural world, that the stumps in our yard were really fairy castles and that every grain silo was a tower for a princess. I have already started to indoctrinate my nieces in fairy lore and you can be sure that I will pass a respect for the fairies that dance around the edge of the dining room table on to my own children.

I pretended to be an elf under a toad stool umbrella in your yard while you made rainbows with the hose. We’ve picked grapes fresh from the arbor and shared numerous “elevenses”. We’ve let the wind blow through our hair as we raced across the meadow in your golf cart.

You read me countless stories, Ms. Minerva and Ollie LaCoy. I cherish those old children’s stories but not nearly as much as I cherish the stories of your life. I don’t need to close my eyes to picture 5 year old Katharine following the trolley tracks home because Betsy had lost her train ticket and you wouldn’t let her walk home alone. I see you on the streets of Charlottesville and on the grounds of UVA as a young woman, sharp and beautiful. I can picture your driving your old Jeep across the dunes and rushing Lee to the doctor after yet another accident. You were always ready to make me laugh with the “Lee Story”. Every campfire song I know comes from you. Thank you for sharing the stories of your life with me; I carry them like they are my own. I will always remember you, dear Katharine, in the Spring time when the flowers begin to bloom, when I set a dinner table (“the fork goes on the left, the knife protects the spoon from the fork”), when I make a cup of tea. You are and always will be a constant part of my life; so much of what I know has been shaped by you. You told me to “forget the boys and wait from the men”. I hope that you approve of the man that I have chosen and I’m happy that he has had an opportunity to know you. I’m sorry that my future children will not get to have you as their “great grandmother”. I promise that they will know all about you. I will hang the boat painting in their bedroom and tell them the story of the elf, Ollie LaCoy, who creeps in the bedrooms of sleeping children, laying drops of warm milk on their eyelids so that they can climb into that painting and sail the boats in their dreams.

I could fill page after page with memories that we created together and wisdom that you have shared, perhaps one day I will, but I will stop now and let this be my goodbye to you. Thank you for everything that your have been and will always be for me, I love you and am blessed to have been able to call you Grandmother and Friend.