In 1947, Christina Mae Grissom was carried out of Appalachia in a cigar box. Born in Huntington, West Virginia, to poor, uneducated parents, the premature infant departed on a train bound west, clad in a handkerchief for a diaper and blind in one eye from medical negligence. Her grandfather bought the tickets. He became her refuge during her early life in Baker, Oregon, where her father worked long hours as a logger, and her mother committed all manner of neglect, leaving Chris to parent her younger siblings from the time she could reach the stove.
Christina departed this world on November 29th, 2021 at age 74, far from the rural poverty that defined her childhood. With her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (earned in record time while working full-time), she spent more than 30 years advocating for mental health clients. She chaired the Michigan Board of Psychology and served fifteen years as the Executive Director of the Jackson/Hillsdale community mental health center (which she transformed into Lifeways). In her retirement, she rewrote the mental health code for the State of North Carolina as a consultant.
As a child, Chris was often told to slow down and not act “too big for her britches.” She peeled ten pounds of potatoes every night for dinner and tried to keep her head down. Chris’ breaking point came one evening as she was leaving to perform as concertmaster and solo violinist in a high school production. Her mother insisted Chris stay home to wash dirty diapers and watch her siblings so her mother could go out. Chris called a cab and left. When her father tracked her down, Chris told him about her mother’s drinking and spending and men; her father hit her so hard that he broke her nose. She somehow didn’t hold this against him.
Christina’s strength in her convictions made her a force, with an unusual decisiveness that cut through all the noise. Once, when she heard that two staff members made less than their peers, she nearly doubled their salaries on the spot. She fiercely advocated for her clients -- got them out of state hospitals, respected them as people. One of her clients gave her away at her wedding. She used her authority to take care of people, on her own terms. And she let people know where they stood. If they stood in her way, she made them move.
“It’s hard to kiss someone when you have a stiff upper lip,” she said, and so it took her until age 35 to find the person she would trust absolutely for the rest of her life. The strength of her marriage with Don, the devotion they had for each other, was hard to miss. They spent perhaps two nights apart in their almost forty years of marriage.
Chris’ determination was all the more remarkable given the chronic pain and illness that plagued her. Due to poorly managed rheumatic fever in her youth, she developed heart disease and had two open-heart surgeries by the time she was 60. She was hit by a car as a child and endured back surgeries and back pain the rest of her life. She’d had a stroke, three hip replacements, rheumatoid arthritis, an embolism, and more conditions than a doctor could digest in a normal visit with her. Would anyone know this if they watched her working away for hours in her garden, often in incredible pain? Probably not.
Any friend would mention her generosity, her loyalty, and her enthusiasm. If you came to visit, you might find that she’d tiled her living room floor by herself since the last time you were there. She might offer you a tarot card reading, gift you one of her new paintings (whether or not it fit in your house), or take you shopping, with the goal of forgetting that there was ever a time in her life when she didn’t have enough. She would host you at a fancy French restaurant or take you thrifting. Or maybe she would guide you through the Chartres labyrinth she asked Don to build in their front lawn.
Don made this exuberance possible. Chris called him “nurturer and keeper at bay of nuisances.” And that he was. Faithfully, he would try to right everything wrong in her world, ease every frustration, keep all annoyances at bay -- and for Chris there were many. Through all the noise of the world, in the end, Don was where she returned, over and over. Chris had a piece of embroidery by her bed: “If you should die before me, ask if you can bring a friend.” She might be asking him right now why it took a year and half to get to him. But we all know he would have brought her sooner if there had been a way.
