Yo, Miss! (No. 29)

Remembering My Grandma Lily

My grandmother, Lilyan Rita Stern, passed away last week. She lived for 100 plus years. I spent the latter part of last week through this week mourning her loss with my family and privately as well. I will continue to mourn her loss for quite some time. We had her funeral on Sunday and I shared some words about her.

I wanted to devote this newsletter to her life and legacy and share my words with you all. We often don’t spend enough time listening and learning from the elders in our lives. Sure, they might come to us with different world views, but they carry an essential and timeless wisdom.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

"Think Yiddish, act British"

"No one cares if you are happy or sad so why not just be happy"

“To get along in the world you have to be a chameleon.” 

“Why?” I asked

“Why?,” she replied, “It’s obvious?”

My Grandma Lily shared her quotations and aphorisms with me and anyone that she encountered who was worthy of hearing them.

She shared them with me quite often throughout my teenage & young adult years. But they resonated more clearly & profoundly with me as I’ve grown older 

New York City is in my DNA because of my grandmother & so is my artistic side & independent side as well. The words and ideas that must come busting out of me onto the page - that’s probably how my grandmother felt about the world she saw & experienced. She just had to paint it. 

My grandmother’s art was both precise and realistic but also fantastical. When she lived in her Manhattan apartment, she once painted her skyline view quite perfectly but then in the center she painted a younger woman than herself at the time - a nude - her but not her. 

She was always perfecting a painting. 

Every time I visited her, she wanted my input on her latest painting & asked my opinion of the ongoing transformation of her art. Was this the right shade? The right positioning of the mug? 

She painted cigar boxes in a beautiful kaleidoscope of geometric colors and then inside the box she painted a portrait or the most realistic painting of a countryside. 

Lilyan Rita Stern was the product of the Great Depression and the Second World War. 

Daughter

Wife

Mother

Grandmother

Great Grandmother

Creator of hundreds & hundreds of amazing pieces of art displayed in galleries until she was 95 years old

Award-winning artist

Art Teacher all-around New York, including the 92nd Street Y

She was an artist who lived her life in color, always interested and interesting. 

I will always cherish the days I spent walking through the streets of NYC with her. Getting into museums for free, perusing the merchandise at Intermix, her teaching me how to navigate the city, and eating frozen yogurt at Forty Carrots at Bloomingdale’s or at the All-American Health Cafe on 57th street. 

When asked what would keep her wanting to live, she said “as long as life interests me I want to go on”

She was interested until the end. Just the other week she sat with me, my mom & dad & while she was eating ice cream she quoted Oscar Wilde: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it”

One of the last things she told me was to keep fighting and stay strong and never let the bastards win & if I ever feel out of sorts just take a nap and then get up again and keep going. 

I will gladly heed her wise advice and every time I walk down a New York City street she will forever be by my side.