Condolence: EULOGY FOR
AMANDA M. (Pinette) McCORMICK

October 10, 1919- October 12, 2017

By Caitlin McCormick, Granddaughter
Presented October 17, 2017

Amanda Marie Pinette McCormick was my grandmother. She was born in Manitoba, Canada in 1919, and weathered 98 winters before she laid down to rest. She lived through two World Wars, the Eisenhower era, the Beatles and Elvis, more wars in Korea and Vietnam and the Middle East, the rise of microwaves and the internet, the births of two children, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, and more episodes of General Hospital and Guiding Light than I can count.

My grandmother was a refined, sophisticated woman, fancier in her final hours than I am on my best day. She was, as my grandfather would have said, “all lady” – perfect nails, fine wool skirts, sweater sets and pearls. She wore heels every day until she was 92. She was proud, sometimes difficult, and stubborn in her strength.

When I was thirteen my grandparents’ house burned down. While waiting for it to be rebuilt, my grandmother, with all that stubborn strength, went into the charred remains of all they’d ever owned together and fished out her most precious pieces – her cross, a vase from her sister in Canada, their wedding china – each turned deep black from smoke and soot. For months, she soaked and scrubbed these pieces until her wrists gave out in tendinitis, but she got every one of them spotlessly clean. She had a certain tenacity about her that could drive you nuts when hearing the same story for the twentieth time (it didn’t matter if you could repeat the ending verbatim – if she wanted to tell it, she would) or when you, like those charred vases, were the subject of her scrubbing. In my case, as a kid, it was typically the night before church. She’d give me a bath in scalding hot water then sit me down while she yanked my hair into a hundred curlers before bed. I was a tomboy, so you can imagine what joy I took from this primping. But she would not give up, seeing some other sort of beauty beneath my awkwardness and grime.

It was this tenacity that helped my grandmother leave home at age fourteen to work in a boarding house in Edmonton. It helped her survive Canadian winters, sew her own clothes, make her own soap, help to raise her 13 siblings. It is how she literally crossed Canada on foot with her family, and later moved down to the US in search of opportunity. She worked in the factories during the war, then met and married my grandfather. While raising two children she powered by sheer will through an episode of blindness, then, when I was young, through a car accident that broke most of her ribs. The death of my grandfather was the first time I saw that singlemindedness waver. She’d lost her companion of nearly sixty years, a man who we all adored. I don’t think she – or any of us – ever stopped missing him.

My grammy was an amazing baker. She crafted the most beautiful pies and cakes from memory. She would stand me on a chair at the kitchen counter and teach me to crack eggs into the bowl. She loved to provide for all of us with the joy and simplicity of someone who’d survived the Depression. That old stubbornness convinced her that I loved ham, and my brother Trevor loved steak, and Adam liked those special rolls and Arin loved the drumstick from the turkey and Andrew loved jello and someone else, we can’t remember who, loved meat pie – or maybe hated meat pie?…. And so every holiday involved more courses than anyone could reasonably eat.

Amanda was incredibly proud of her children, my dad and aunt, loved them both more than she could ever put into words, and always struggled to do so. I think that love flowed out more easily for her grandchildren. When together, we, her family, would make her eyes shine with happy tears.

She was a devout, deeply religious Catholic. She said her rosary nightly and kept a small gold crucifix in her purse, especially useful when playing the slots. She was a natural mathematician, calculating complex numbers in her head, which helped her beat us all at cards until her very last months on this earth. In another generation, she would have been a statistician or an engineer. She was a killer in the bowling lanes. She and my grandfather danced a waltz and a two-step at the Knights of Columbus on the weekends. She spoke fluent French. She made the most comfortable beds. She tried to cultivate the home and the family she saw in her mind’s eye, at times critical and fierce in her perfectionism, other times gentle, tending her bright red geraniums each summer, holding her grandbabies and then their babies with soft hands.

I’m proud to have had her as my grandmother and hope that I will inherit some of her strength. Our family was shaped by that strong will. She gave us herself for 98 years and I know she is resting now, with her husband and her siblings and her God, telling the same stories for the rest of time, filling eternity with her pies.