“Say your prayers, and keep your legs crossed.” — RIP Louise Kane, 1915 - 2011

Louise with my mom at the Zandt Family Reunion, maybe 10-15 years ago

[UPDATED below with a pic and short story from my brother]

This morning, my neighbor from growing up, Louise Kane, passed away. It feels weird to even type her name out — my brother and I called her “Mrs. Kane” well after we were already adults. She’d say, “Call me ‘Louise!’ God!” But we just couldn’t.

I want to share some stories about her as I begin the sort of “official” grieving process. She’d been declining for a while — she was due to turn 96 in two weeks — but the loss is deeply painful. I can’t do the whole picture of her justice, but let me start by explaining that she was one of the most influential bad-ass women of my life, along with my mom and my grandmother (mom’s mother). I gave Izzy her middle name, Louise, in honor of her.

A strict Irish-Catholic, Mrs. Kane used to call my Lutheran family “broken-away Catholics,” and married a Jewish man twenty years older than her. We never got to meet Louie (yes, they were “Louie and Louise”) — he died the year before my parents moved in next door to her — but his spirit was always very much part of her. 

She didn’t have any children of her own (though her sister, her sister’s family and many cousins populated her life), so in many ways, my brother and I became her grandchildren. She babysat us, came to every concert/play/school thing we did, was part of every big life moment. Never without an opinion about what were doing, either. When we’d get in trouble, she’d hear about it from my parents and sternly ask us later, “Did you LEARN anything?” We couldn’t bluff the answer, either. We always had to have solid explanations of what we’d learned. I still carry that question with me today.

It was that stern hand that earned her a nickname when we were still kids. We’d sometimes be more afraid of her finding about our antics than our own parents, so my brother named her “Sergeant Kane.” Mind you, this was a woman that ran a trucking company in Binghamton til she was 75 years old. Teamsters were scared of her! When we were a little older, she found out about the nickname and roared— she loved it. She owned it. After that, she signed all her birthday and Christmas cards, “Sgt Kane” with a flourish. 

When I was 17, I went to Germany to be an exchange student. Right before I left, my family had a little going away party for me, and she gave me a lovely card. It was one of those “we’re so proud of you, a young woman going into the world” cards, and I smiled. Then I looked at how she signed it: “Say your prayers, and keep your legs crossed. Love, Sgt Kane.” I slapped it shut and grinned as my face went red — that wasn’t getting passed around to the party, no.

My dad tells a great story about how my parents first became friends with Mrs. Kane. It was the winter after they’d moved into the house next door to her. It’d snowed a bunch one Saturday morning, and my dad shoveled our walk. Knowing there was this older lady next door, he did her walk and driveway, too. She opened her front door to thank him. “Would you like to come in and warm up with a brandy?” she asked. At 10am on a Saturday. My dad said he knew then they’d be fast friends. 

She always gave me a hard time about my hair. I’ve been dying it one color or another since I was about 13 years old, but the bleached platinum that it is now was by far the worst offender. (She handled the purple/pink/red phases well, by comparison.) She’d always say to me, “God, you have such pretty hair, why do you have to do that to it?!”

My hair became a joke, especially after she went into the nursing home, a way for me to see how she was doing mentally. If she didn’t complain about my hair, I worried. If she did, I knew she was doing well. When I last saw her about a week and a half ago, she was pretty much in a coma-like state. She opened her eyes and smiled when she saw me, and later right before I left, she opened them again. I asked her was she thought of my new haircut, and she just cocked an eyebrow at me. I cracked up laughing, and she smiled a little, too.

We’ll always have a good laugh, Sgt Kane, and your memory will live on though us.

—

Update, from my brother:

Mrs. Kane was always known for giving $2 bills as gifts; this was my present when I turned 25. :)