Living Like Loretta

Orchard Beach, 1952

“Brookie… let’s go on an adventure.”

When I replay my earliest memories with my grandma Loretta, I can still hear her whispering those words. For many years, it was kind of our catchphrase - used for everything from trying a new food to going to the doctor to taking the training wheels off my bike. With that one sentence, she taught me that anything and everything in life could be exciting if I let it.

Loretta taught me so much about how to move through the world, and some of her best lessons came in the form of signature Loretta-isms - my favorites being, “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” and “Life is short - buy the shoes.” Yes, Loretta loved beautiful things, and yes, I do too - no shame - but those lessons were about more than indulgence. To me, they were about choosing joy, choosing presence, finding beauty in the everyday, and not putting off happiness for some uncertain future. If she could chime in right now, I have no doubt she’d crack a joke about how they don’t actually check the balance of your bank account in heaven.

That was the thing about Loretta: she didn’t ration joy, and she didn’t ration love. To be loved by Loretta was to feel like the most important person in the world, and I loved her right back.

My whole life, I loved Loretta out loud - wanting to be just like her, thinking she was the most beautiful, brave, creative, and fabulous person in the world - so when she got sick, I started bracing myself for immense and inevitable grief.

The last decade wasn’t easy for Loretta, but she met it the way she met everything else: fearlessly, enthusiastically, and a little stubbornly. She beat cancer multiple times and stared down heart disease with her signature “not today” attitude. Even when she was in pain, she put others before herself. While her body eventually told a different story, I never stopped seeing her as the woman she truly was - not the version shaped by illness or age, but the one who taught me how to live with style, guts, humor, and an unapologetic sense of self.

Then, on her last day, with the loss I had been bracing for right in front of me, I realized I had been so focused on losing her that I had nearly missed the greatest lesson she would ever teach me.

For as long as I can remember, Loretta had this piece of art in her kitchen - a framed needlepoint of three little pigs that read, “Dear Lord, if you won’t make me thin, please make my friends fat.” It was classic Loretta - funny, sarcastic, self-deprecating - and also a window into something deeper.

For someone so glamorous and magnetic, Loretta never saw herself the way the rest of us did. My whole life, I heard, “Brookie, I’m too fat,” or “Who’s that old lady in the mirror?” or “I look like hell.” Meanwhile, all I saw was perfection - everything I loved most in the world.

Then, standing across from her in the hospital, she reached out, touched the dimple in my chin, then hers, winked, and said, as she had so many times before, “My girl.”

I had always taken those words at face value, believing I was her girl because I was her granddaughter, because I belonged to her in the way grandchildren belong to their grandparents. Only then did I realize I had been hearing what she said, not what she meant. I was hers because we were the same.

Under the white hospital lights, I looked at her face and saw more than our matching dimples. I saw myself - the way I love, the way I live, and the way I see the world.

That was the haunting irony: without meaning to, I had become my own version of the person I loved most, and yet had spent my life struggling to accept the very things in myself that I loved so completely in her.

That’s the final Loretta lesson - the one she never got to learn, but one I’ll carry for both of us: life is too short to see yourself only through your own critical eye. Try to see yourself through the eyes of the people who love you. You might find that the very things you wish were different about yourself are the same things someone else wouldn’t change for the world.

Loretta lives in me: in the way I see the world through a creative lens, in the way I design a room, and in the way I style things in odd numbers, just like she taught me. She’s there when I buy the extra pair of shoes I definitely don’t need, when I spend a little too much time decorating the perfect Christmas tree, when I get overly competitive, and when I’m not willing to give up or admit that I’m wrong.

She’s there, too, when I remind myself to be kinder to the parts of me that came from her.

Life is short - so buy the shoes, take the trip, order the extra martini, and plant your favorite flowers by the door every spring. Most of all, try to love yourself the way Loretta loved the people around her - with everything she had, until the very end.