The life and legacy of Helen (Bonnie) Delia
As a child, I went over to my grandparents’ house multiple times a week. They lived right down the street, so it was really easy to get there. There were always more desserts in their house than mine and I got to stay up late, so it was usually my favorite place. My favorite memories from that house though, were the Saturday night sleepovers. I got to hang out and watch grown up movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings with my grandfather, which is why I have such a love for film now a days. But the best part of the sleepovers was when I got to cook, with the best chef in the world, my grandmother, Mommom. She was a wiz in the kitchen. She could cook and bake anything. On Saturday nights we would make homemade personal pizza and even though she used to knock my hands with the wooden spoon every time I spread the sauce on too thick, it was so much fun. I would decorate the pizzas with pepperoni smiley faces and use strips of pepper for the eyebrows. After that we would always bake a fun dessert, whether it was her famous banana bars, apple pie, which was my grandfather’s favorite, or my personal favorite her lemon bars. Then in the morning we made homemade pancake crepes. Her pancakes were always fluffy and soft, unlike my mom’s which have always been thin and crunchy. We would fill them with melted chocolate and strawberries, or apple slices, brown sugar and cinnamon. My grandmother never got mad at me when I made a mess or a mistake. She would just calmly smile and teach me how to fix it.
Everything from baking tricks, to tailoring your own clothing, to healthcare tips and stain removal, she had a remedy for it. Baking soda for stains, the world’s best homemade tea for a sore throat, she taught me how to sow and patch my own clothing and even reupholster furniture. She’s the reason why today I feel like I can handle any obstacle thrown in my path.
She’s the woman who was able to raise her 5 brothers, 5 children, 11 grandchildren, battled breast cancer and ALS, while still graduating from college and holding a successful career in teaching for over 25 years.
Unfortunately, after all that fighting, teaching, cooking and caring, she lost her battle to ALS and passed away this past October. And while the family she held together was left heartbroken and upset, we all know that thanks to the strength and determination she instilled in all of us we’ll be okay.
Bonnie didn’t become a strong and powerful woman overnight. She lived a long and arduous life that sculptured her into the unwavering grandmother I knew and loved.
Helen Elizabeth Kelly, or as she grew up being called “Bonnie”, was born on April 13, 1948 in Deal, New Jersey. Deal’s a small-town right by the shore, with just a few streets of houses, an elementary school, a police station and one main road with a few shops on it. She was the only girl of 6 and the middle child. There were her older brother’s John and Kevin and her younger brothers Chris, Mark and Brendan. Thanks to my grandmothers love for family I became very close with all of her brothers, my great uncles, except Kevin. He sadly passed away right as I was born from pancreatic cancer. The three that are still alive today, Brendan, Mark and Chris, still attend all the birthday parties and holiday gatherings the family has throughout the year.
As Bonnie continued to grow up she acted more as a second mother to all of her brothers rather than a sister and after completing high school at Red Bank Catholic and having an all-star basketball career there, she was offered a full scholarship to Cabrini College to play on their women’s basketball team.
Unfortunately, after the first year at school, my grandmother’s first major obstacle in life hit like a tidal wave, and with that wave everything she considered important at the time was swept away. Her mother passed away from breast cancer when she was only 18, so she had to move back home to take care of her brothers. At that time, her youngest brother was only 10 so they still needed a nurturing figure in their lives.
When her youngest brother Brendan looks back on those years, he’s still astonished that she gave up so much for them. “I mean honestly, I don’t know how I would have survived without her. At the time you have to think it was around 1966 so our father was a working man. He didn’t cook or clean or know who to be both a mother and a father to 6 kids, so that became Bonnie’s job. And she did it for years, even after she met Ralph, she was still there helping us. She didn’t complain or get upset, she just did it.”
Throughout my childhood I used to ask Mommom why she came back and why she didn’t just stay at school with her friends, and she would explained to me, that even though this wasn’t how she envisioned her life as a little girl, coming home and taking care of her family was the most important thing to her. She always said that being a mother to her brothers did help her realize that she had a true passion and skill for working with children.
So, after being back home and raising her brothers for about a year she went back to school, this time closer to home at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, which is about two towns over from Deal. She finished the year out and received her Associates degree. While she was going to Monmouth, she also met my grandfather Ralph Delia and within two years they were married and by the age of 21 my grandmother was pregnant with my mother, Carrie.
After she had my mom, Bonnie stayed at home and my grandfather went to work as a carpenter. Four years later they had their second child, Ralph Jr. and then another tragedy struck, my grandmother’s father died, of pancreatic cancer. Two years after that they had their third child, Bryan and when my mother was 10, they had their youngest two kids, twins, Michael and Kevin. Throughout all of their childhoods my grandmother stayed home with them. They were very poor and barely made ends meet, but that’s what forced her to learn all of her tricks for tailoring things yourself, home remedies for sicknesses and cheaper ways to cook and bake. Bonnie would buy bread and lunch meat and the go in and cut it even thinner to create more slices and all of the youngest boys’ clothes were hammy downs from the older boys. My mom was the only one with her own room since she was the only girl and the 4 boys lived all together in the other bedroom. My uncles and my mother also played sports constantly to stay out of trouble. So, my grandmother would drive them everywhere, patch up their jerseys after every game, and thrift their equipment. Nothing was ever new in that house. Nowadays, most people don’t think of a stay at home mom as a superhero. It’s more normal for women to be both a mom and hold a job, but in that family if my grandmother could keep her kids’ routines running smoothly then she was performing a miracle.
My oldest uncle, Ralph Jr., explains it best when he talks about how insane it was for my grandmother as a Mom. “We were psychopaths. The other parents in town used to call us the Delia Mafia. We were a group of young reckless boys who just constantly wanted to get into trouble. But your mother, (as in my grandmother’s oldest, Carrie) was no saint either. This one time we were trying to take the plastic wrapping off this carpet we had found and because she’s half blind and a klutz she missed and stabbed the knife through my thigh. She started freaking out, but Mom, (as in Bonnie) heard her screaming, came into the room, saw the knife in my thigh and calmly wrapped a towel around my leg, tied it tight and carried me into the car and drove me right to the hospital, like it was no big thing.”
Honestly for that family it wasn’t an abnormal thing taking a trip to the ER. My Uncle Bryan once drilled a screw halfway through his hand before he realized it wasn’t the wood. My Uncle Michael threw my Uncle Kevin down the stairs and he smashed right through the glass of the front door, and my mother, Carrie, once dumped a boiling hot pot of grease on herself. Each time my grandmother just dealt with it, she didn’t flip or call 911, she just went into her draws and got out some magical thing she owned and solved the problem. By the time the boys had grown up my grandmother could stitch up cuts by herself and reset broken bones.
When my mother finally went off to college, the rest of the boys were old enough to be self-sufficient, so my grandmother took a part time job at the middle school in town. She was a lunch attendant for the kids and for those few years she did the job perfectly, but then the school terminated the position, thankfully the students loved her so much the school kept her and hired her as a part-time substitute.
At this point my mom was out of college and had met my father and all of my uncles were either going into college, high school or the military, so they didn’t really need Mommom around 24/7. My grandmother loved the job, so she became full-time substitute and teachers-aid. She loved the imagination of the younger kids, so she typically taught in classes with Pre-schoolers up to 8th grade, but nothing older.
As she continued to teach, she also joined the Ladies Auxiliary in Deal to support the fire department that all of her brothers were members in and helped my grandfather out at the Elks Club, with bake sales and team dinners for her sons’ baseball teams. A few years later, while she was teaching, another obstacle fell in her path. One day she felt something strange on her chest and since her mother had passed away from Breast cancer, she went to have it checked out immediately. At the time the doctor told her that she only had the markers for breast cancer, but there was no actual tumor yet. From that day on she always said, she waited for the day she was told she had cancer, the irony was that that day never came. Instead worse news was delivered.
In spring of 2016, we received the news that she had been diagnosed with environmental ALS or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It’s a genetic nervous system disease that slowly degrades muscles in the whole body until they just stop working. A few notable people that have had ALS were Lou Gehrig, Stephen Hawking and the bassist from Toto, Mike Porcaro and as of today there is still no cure.
With the news of her diagnosis and knowing there was no cure, it became a question of how long? How long did my great uncles have with their sister? How long did my mother and her brothers have with their mom? How long did my 10 cousins and I have with our grandma?
My mother, being the oldest, became her primary caretaker. She went to the doctors with her the most and was heartbroken.
“You’re just never ready for that kind of news,” said Carrie, “Obviously I knew they were both getting older and they weren’t going to be around forever, but to hear that there is an end date to her life in the near future, is just gut wrenching.”
I vividly remember the day my mom came home and told me the outcome of Mommom’s test. I was definitely upset, but just like my grandmother taught me, I didn’t want to dwell on it. She would always say, “you just have to take what you get and move on”. Which is exactly what she did. Even with this life-threatening news nothing stopped her. She still did everything she had done before. Come Christmas time she still made all the cookies and Christmas candy. She still wrapped presents for everyone’s birthdays. She still made hand painted eggs for Easter, made Valentine’s Day goodie bags for all the grandkids and cooked corn beef and cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day.
As the years passed and she grew weaker, she still didn’t stop these traditions, she just needed more help.
Her last Christmas with us, I was 19 at the time and my sister, who was 13, and my twin cousins, both 15, all went over to her house to help get the baking and gift wrapping done. My sister, Kelly, and one of the twins, Audrey, were in charge of baking the different kinds of cookies. The family favorites were, peanut butter, snickerdoodle, Italian snowball and pizzellas. The other twin, Michael, can’t cook or bake to save his life, so he was in charge of wrapping and labeling gifts. And I was with Mommom. We were in charge of making different kinds of potato candies, peanut butter and chocolate, cookies and cream, and coconut. It’s a bittersweet memory. My cousins and I love being together, making a mess and testing all the sweets, but watching Mommom struggle to lift even a spatula was hard. Of course, it didn’t stop her. At one point she tried to lift a pan of cookies out of the oven and right before they all fell to the ground, I grabbed the pan with my bare hands. Obviously, I burned myself, but I couldn’t even be mad at her. You had to give the woman props for being so persistent.
I recently asked my sister Kelly if she remembered that day and she laughed and said, “Yeah, that was the day we discovered that you’re so bad at making potato candy that even without the full use of her arms or legs, Mommom did a better job than you.”
It was true, even while suffering from ALS my grandmother could still bake circles around us, she was that good. And even though many people might find what my sister said to be a bit tasteless in light of the seriousness of the disease, that too was how Mommom made light of any situation. When I used to bring her to her appointments, she would crack jokes with the nurses or make subtle comments under her breathe about a person’s fashion choices just to make me laugh. She wanted to make me feel more comfortable even though she was the one getting stuck with needles.
In October of this past year, when I received the call at school that she had passed away, I wasn’t immediately upset that she was gone. I was mad I didn’t get to say goodbye. I was mad I didn’t get to thank her for every single thing she taught me and show her how much of my life has been shaped by her. But just as she would have done, I picked my head up, wiped away the tears and carried on with my day. Another unforgettable thing she’s say was “there is no sense in getting upset and complaining over something you can’t change.”
When I went home for the funeral, I helped my mom pick out the pictures for the memory boards at the wake and I began to look back at her life through these photos. While my mom looked at them and cried, I saw them and thought of the massive legacy my grandmother leaves behind. She was a true matriarch. She helped raise over three generations of children and for almost 25 years looked after kids everyday of her life. She taught me and my cousins invaluable lessons on life and love and how to handle any problem. But most importantly, she created an unbreakable family bond.
No matter the holiday or random family celebration there is always a gathering of 50 to 60 people, half the time I can’t even tell you how I’m related to them. They’ve just always been there all my life. And when I ask, people just say, “Oh we’re a friend of your grandmother’s”. It happens so often I’ve come to accept the answer.
Thanks to my grandmother, whenever anything bad, unplanned or misfortunate happens in my life I know I have the biggest support system behind me. Everyone lives only a few miles away from each other, on weekends we hang out, randomly drop by each other’s houses to just raid the fridge or have dinner. We go to one another’s athletic games, dance competitions, performances, concerts, ceremonies. You name it and the whole family will be there. That way when you look out into the audience or the crowd, you have so much more than just mom and dad you have an army of support and love and all of that is Bonnie’s influence.
I was lucky to call her Mommom. Not because she was the mother of my mother, but because she came to every 8-hour long softball tournament, every early Sunday morning soccer game, every theater performance, choir concert, award ceremony, dance recital, and graduation I ever had. I knew that every time I got off stage or came off the field, I’d get a good job from Mom and Dad, a high five from Poppop, but I’d being looking forward to the big hug or the bouquet of flowers I got from Mommom, and they weren’t just any flowers they were hers. They were hand grown and handpicked from her garden and she’d always wrap them in bright sparkly ribbon just for me.
Today, months after the funeral, my mother still keeps her garden growing, the family participates in a walk to end ALS together as one big team called “Bonnie’s Brawlers” and once a month on Saturday morning all the cousins go to our local church that we’ve been parishioners at since birth and help in the food pantry.
All of this done, in memory of her.
The women who taught me to love art and creativity, who created special easy recipes for me to bring to college because she knew I wasn’t the best cook. The women who raised my mother into a strong independent women, who in turn has raised me to be just like them. And even though I miss her more and more each day and I wish every second she was still here with us; I know she is not lost. Her legacy lives on in 3 brothers, 5 children, 1 son-in-law, 4 daughter-in-law’s, and 11 grandchildren.
So, to the best baker, master chef, skilled tailor, number one listener and greatest grandmother ever…thank you. Thank you for never letting anything in your life stop you from living it, thank you for showing me what it means to be strong but caring. Thank you for the eternal memories of a happy childhood and thank you for the everlasting legacy of love you’ve left behind.
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