Although I did not know Frank outside of school and reunions, we had some good laughs together and went to the same schools through high school graduation.

As a child, my mother often told me the story of how she and my father had met, fallen in love, and married. The way my mother told it, it seemed magical and destined by the forces of fate, as if nothing could have kept my parents from encountering each other that evening. The dance my mother was supposed to attend was fortuitously canceled, while my father was alone in an unfamiliar city, with no plans for the evening. They both ended up at the same night club, where my father asked her to dance.

My grandmother advised my mother, “He said he was on a business trip from out of town. That’s what men say when they’re married.” My mother, having recently moved, mistakenly gave my father a phone number with one incorrect digit, but he found her the next day anyway. A couple months later my mother quit her job and moved from Oakland to Everett, where they were married seven months after meeting.

I loved this story for the romance but also because it showed two people vastly different from the parents I knew. It was difficult to imagine my mother in a miniskirt, my father the homebody traveling to a different city, or either of them in a night club. And it was almost impossible to imagine in them the exhilaration and decisiveness that led to this whirlwind romance.

More recently, my parents spent their evenings at home in the living room. My mother would say, “Some hot cocoa would be good right now.” And my father would respond, “Would you like some hot cocoa? I’ll make us some,” as if this were a novel idea, and the same dialogue had not taken place the night before, and the night before that.

I fear I might have left something out between the nightclub in Oakland and the hot cocoa in the living room. But the truth is, I have no idea how a couple so successfully transitions from one nightlife to another over the course of 55 years.

The day before he died, my father asked for my mother. He could no longer see, but he brought his hand to her face to feel its contours, and he told her she was “so beautiful.” 
In his last days, I heard my father call my mother Cherry, “my wife,” and “grandma.” I like to imagine that his various names for her in these days suggest that he was remembering her throughout all their years together, as the woman Cherry he met that night in Oakland, as his wife soon thereafter, and eventually as we know her now, Grandma. And when he told her she was so beautiful, it was as he had seen her the night they met, as he saw her the day before he died, and all of the days in between.


I was so sorry to hear about Frank's passing. I know what a loving grandfather and father he was. He will be missed.

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Frank C. Forray

15 juillet 1937 – 24 septembre 2021

Acacia Memorial Park & Funeral Home

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AVIS DE DÉCÈS

Frank C. Forray

15 juillet 1937 – 24 septembre 2021

Acacia Memorial Park & Funeral Home

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