These past few weeks have been rough for me. While the world was mourning David Bowie and Alan Rickman, I was making plans to put my kitten down. At the same time, I learned that one of the most amazing people I have ever known past away. Molly Adams, 91 of Wayland Massachusetts passed away on January 14th. This woman was as close as a grandparent to me, and I was lucky enough to interview her for a class a few years back. Here is a piece I wrote about her and her life, that I hope will serve as my memorial to her.
Mrs. Mary Adams—“Please, call me
Molly”—welcomes me into her small cozy home in Wayland Massachusetts on the
Saturday after thanksgiving. I step up
into the house and follow her to the living room, the walls scattered with
pictures of her family and friends.
“So, what do you want to know?” she
asks me as we sit down on her living room couch.
“Everything,” I reply.
“Why do you want to interview me
anyway?” She asks with a smile and the snarky attitude of any teenager, “I’m
boring. I haven’t done anything
interesting.” She might not know it, but
she’s lying through her teeth.
I explain to her my assignment to
write a profile on someone I find interesting.
“I never really got a chance to learn about my grandparents. And, well, you’re really the closest thing to
a grandparent I have,” I explain. I
leave out all of the wonderful stories I’ve heard about her life— “She was a
star lacrosse and field hockey player as a teen,” “she lived in Australia for a
while,” “She survived breast cancer,” that’s the real reason I’m here. I want
to know everything about her.
Molly Louise Keay was born and
raised in the small town of Clifton Heights, outside of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. There, her great
grandfather had built a Woolen Mill that made uniforms for soldiers of World
War I and II. The town grew around that
mill and her family stayed there. Molly
was the youngest of six children, three boys and three girls who grew up in a
three-story Victorian house with their parents, a grandmother and an aunt. Outside was a barn, where Molly discovered
her love of animals.
“The only thing I wanted for my
twelfth birthday was a lamb,” she says, then leans in towards me and whispers
with excitement, “my mother got me two.”
Along with her lambs, she cared for pet goats, chickens, and ducks. “And we always had cats and dogs.” Her living room is decorated with paintings
and pictures, wooden carvings and stuffed animals of every species. “I always wanted to be a vet,” She says,
pouting a bit as she recalls her unfulfilled dream. “Nowadays, if you told your
parents you wanted to be a vet and they said no—well nowadays they wouldn’t say
no,” she cuts herself off as she realizes the differences. “But if
they said no, you would ignore them and become a vet anyways, right?” I nod
in agreement and she continues. “Well
back then that didn’t happen. If your
parents told you ‘it’s not proper for a young lady to be a vet,’ that was the
end of it.”
She never became the vet she always
wanted to be, but she did a whole lot more.
It was no coincidence that Molly met Dwight Adams, the love of her life,
on a tour of the United Nations building.
After they were married, they travelled the world together, starting
with long road trips across regions of America, then moving on to Europe,
Africa, and settling for six months in Australia. Even with three children, Molly continued to
travel, climbing Mount Kenya and Ayer’s rock (before it was banned) with her
two daughters, and touring the wildlife of Australia with her daughter Sarah.
“At night we’d sit and sing around
this huge bonfire,” she tells me about a five-day wildlife trip in
Australia. Other than Molly and Sarah,
everyone was Australian, and two of the men brought their instruments
along. “And the last night, we were next
to a river and the moon was out, and they were playing and we were singing and
the Kangaroos were walking around.” She points
me to a painting in the corner of the room.
I walk over to see the inside of tree bark, art by the aborigines of
Australia. The white paint against the
deep brown bark depicts birds and animals in the rainforest.
But Molly’s life wasn’t always one
of luxurious world travel. She settled
for a college closer to home when her mother was diagnosed with terminal
cancer, and stayed home to care for her. She survived college during World War
II, worrying about two of her brothers in the Marines and the Navy and learning
to live with food stamps and blacken the windows at night. Soon after, her sister was diagnosed with
polio and taught Molly the importance of caring for other people.
“She was one of those people that
you never felt sorry for and she never complained and everybody loved her,”
Molly says. “I asked her one time, I
said ‘how can you always be so…up?’ And
she said ‘I have to always be up! Because if I’m nasty and disagreeable,
nobody’s gonna take care of me. You
can’t be nasty, you’ve got to be nice.”
“You get out of what you give and
because I volunteered in this town, up to my eyeballs, I’ve gotten to know so
many people here and I have so many good friends. I always say that you get more out of it than
you give.”
At a young age, Molly took what she
learned from her life’s troubles into the world, volunteering at the school,
the historical society, the Depot, the polls, and much more. She also
volunteered for a family in Wayland, trying a new wave of medicine called
“patterning,” where she met my grandmother.
A woman in town had a child who was born with a brain aneurism. “He couldn’t do anything,” she says, “he
couldn’t walk or talk or move.” After
talking to numerous doctors, the mother found a group of doctors willing to
help her with a new theory of medicine.
“Three times a day, for three days a week, a team of 5 people would come
and help him move in different ways.” Molly places her feet up on the bench in front
of her, showing how the teams would help the boy move his legs to teach him how
to walk.
“The first
day that he got up and walked was our day on duty,” she tells me as the joyful
memories come to her eyes, “and it was one of the most incredible things I’ve
ever seen.”
After that,
she stayed in contact with my grandmother, Janet Owen. “We became friends as couples,” she said,
“playing tennis and bridge and going cross country skiing together.” Years passed and they stayed friends. They came to thanksgiving and Christmas
dinner when their own family was out of town, touring the world or with the
other side of the family. Dwight passed
before I had the chance to know him but Molly continued to visit my grandmother,
playing card games and word games like scrabble and boggle. After Gran died, Molly
still came to visit, bringing her dogs to play with Granddad’s dogs and my
sister and I. When Granddad died in 2009, we begged Molly to sit in the front
pew with the family. After all, she is
family, and she knew him better than us grandchildren ever would.
Before I leave, Molly takes me on a
tour of the first floor, showing and explaining the pictures of her childhood
home and the various photos of her children. I hug her goodbye and thank her
for everything. “I would walk you to the door, but I think I need a break” she
says and I nod. “I’d like to read this,
whatever it is you’re writing.”
“Of course,” I say as I stand up
from the couch again. “I’ll see you soon
Molly,” and I make my way out the way I came, happy in all the things I learned
and excited to write about this amazing woman.
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