The Grace Frank Century: 100 Years of Living

On Monday, December 14th, 2020, after suffering advanced dementia for the better part of three years, my mother slipped quietly away. She was ninety-nine and a half years old.

She was born on July 20th, 1921, in Utica, New York, a year after the end of the terror wreaked by the Spanish Flu pandemic. She died this month, in the middle of the current Coronavirus pandemic. Her father, Joseph Gualtieri, was born in Calabria, Italy in 1885, as the Civil War here was ending. Her mother, Marianna Buccini, was born in 1900 in New York.

When Grace was just six, her mother contracted tuberculosis and was treated and then convalesced in a sanatorium for the next six years. Her father was a carpenter with little means and was unable to both work and care for his four children. So, after an unsuccessful six-month stint with an Aunt and Uncle, the four Gualtieri children were placed in an orphanage, with two living parents. They were to live there for the next six years, throughout the Great Depression. The strength and resilience Grace learned in those years was to serve her for the rest of her life.

Mary finally recovered and the family was reunited in 1933. Two years later, when Grace was fourteen, her thirteen-year-old sister Jenny died of tuberculosis. After Jenny's burial, the family never spoke of Jenny's death. Her mother never fully recovered her health, and so upon graduation from High School, Grace began working and helping her father care for her younger siblings. In 1941, at the age of twenty, she took a job at Griffith Air Force Base in Rome, New York, supporting the WW II effort.

After the war, Grace lived in a boarding house in New Jersey, and worked in the secretary pool in an office in New York City. In 1953, on a weekend vacation at Lake George, in a town called Schroon Lake(!), she met my father, Lorant. They played ping pong, went rowing and took long walks. They couldn't separate from each other, so they talked almost all night long. Some of us believe in love at first site, others may not, but they met that weekend, and spent the next 42 years together.

They married the next year. Grace was Catholic, Lorant was Jewish so they married on two different days, in two different ceremonies: The first was their official marriage by the NYC Justice of the Peace, just the two of them and their two witnesses. The next day, they were married in a Jewish ceremony to please Grace's new mother-in-law, Ruth Frank, who was orthodox. Neither were staunchly religious, and after their marriage, they both converted to a more open religion in the Unitarian Church.

They moved to Buffalo, NY where Lorant had found an engineering job. On September 16th, 1957, Claudia Elaine Frank was born. The following year, as Grace had grown tired of the cold Buffalo winters and had been reading up on sunnier climes, they put Claudia in her bassinet (no seat belts then, mind you), packed up their white '54 Chevy Bel Air, and drove across country to the San Francisco Bay Area. There they laid down roots in Palo Alto, and they never left.

Grace hadn't had the chance to go to college, and she always wanted to continue her education. At the age of near 50 she began her college career. She wanted to prove to herself she could do it. She wanted to prove to the world she could do it. (she did have a bit of a chip on her shoulder, not having earned a college degree) So she did. She got her AA from Foothill College, her BA from Hayward State University and her MA from San Jose State University, all in the Fine Arts. She studied and worked in ceramics, tapestry, and collage at first. Then she went on to watercolor, painting, printing, and intaglio. She found her stylistic home in Abstract Expressionism. Her heroes were Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. I remember vividly coming home from high school and seeing her on her knees in Claudia's then vacant room, working colors into a very large canvas on the floor. Her explorations took her into broad sweeping strokes of color, and subtle pastel color gradations. Upon her final graduation she was then in her 60's. She had several exhibits, one at an outdoor exhibition of new artists at Stanford, several others at local venues. But at that point in her life, she no longer had the drive to book engagements to show her art.

I moved to New York City in 1984, and my sister followed in 1985. Over the next ten years our parents visited us frequently, and where we were able to see our extended family all over the Eastern Seaboard. In 1995, having survived triple bypass heart surgery in 1979, my father suffered an acute heart arrhythmia and died. Three years later, in 1998, my sister died under tragic circumstances. My mother never succumbed to the heartbreak of losing her life's partner, and sadder still, her first born child. She was angry and confused at times, at times overcome with emotion. But she stayed strong for me, even when I wanted her to more fully express her grief, and even when my grief became difficult to bear. She knew life was filled with joy and loss, and she stayed steady in the face of both. She was a rock. That is who she was. She was my rock.

Alicia and I made her a grandmother at 82 years old. She had always had a thing about her age, and kept telling us she was in no hurry to achieve grandmother status. But when Lily was born, it was love at first sight. The two of them were thick as thieves. And, since my mom did not want to be called "Grandma", Alicia came up with a new handle for her that she adored: "Gigi". (GG - short for Grandma Grace…) Having Lily and Jace in her life gave her limitless joy. She was still playing wiffleball and building snowmen with them at age 89. On her final trip to NYC, at the age of 92, I tried to no avail to discourage her from playing balloon volleyball with them in our living room. (she'd had both her hips replaced after all!) The kids tickled her pink: she was a person who wanted to be taken seriously, but she loved it when people made her laugh. (She did once chase me around a parking lot in San Francisco trying to get back her tuna sandwich I'd swiped…laughed til we cried…)

When we moved to San Carlos in 2014, she was able to enjoy more time with us. Her slide into dementia after that was slow and progressive: She was still mostly present with us until that last 2-3 years.

Grace was by no means a perfect person. But she was a loving soul, and a fierce and fantastic mother. Bless you and keep you, Gigi. May you journey on in peace. Claudia and Dad wait for you with open arms. When night falls and I look up at the sky, I like to think of you and Dad doing the Blue Tango together among the stars.