Lebanon
She was in the Genesis Lebanon Center on Old Etna Road, where she had lived for eight years. The morphine dulled her pain.
Her granddaughter, Kerri Moses, sat beside the bed, holding her hand, attentive, dipping the little brush into the dense-walled glass bottle and using it to paint a dark crimson polish onto Lavalette’s nails, one last time.
Death was a choice. Lavalette, 73, had said for years she didn’t want any more surgeries. And now the colon cancer had blocked her intestines. Her heart was weak. Breathing was a challenge because of the chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Lavalette was a born fighter — her entire life, she had pushed back against the indignities of poverty with a mixture of grit and kindness — but now, it was time.
While Moses did her nails, she felt a bit of pressure. Lavalette was squeezing Moses’ hand.
“I know she could hear what we were saying,” said Lavalette’s daughter, Bridget Lavalette. “Because sometimes she’d flick her eyes.”
The family hovered, uncertain. They had been there for two days. Her last breath would come soon, but no one knew when. Finally, at about 11 p.m., they went home, planning to return to their vigil the following morning.
The call came before they had a chance to make it back. Lavalette had died at 6:43 a.m.
Those who saw Anita Lavalette around the Upper Valley probably didn’t take the time to get to know her. She lived a largely uncelebrated life in the background of the community, eating a doughnut and drinking coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts over on Main Street in West Lebanon, or scanning her cards while puffing on her cigarette in the Elks Lodge Bingo Hall, or climbing out of a car along the side of a road, so she could trundle up to inspect the small ceramic wares arranged haphazardly on the tables of the latest yard sale.
Those who saw Lavalette would never have known that her life began as it ended — with a death watch.
For most of her life, as she moved from home to home in the Twin States, Lavalette carried a cardboard box with her. Inside, among other mementos, was a yellow scrap from an Enosburg Falls newspaper that declared her to be the community’s lowest birthweight baby to have ever survived into childhood.
“My mom,” said her daughter, “came into the world fighting.” When Lavalette was born, in January of 1943, the world’s attention was focused on World War II — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just flown to Morocco for war talks with Winston Churchill, thereby becoming the first sitting president to fly in an airplane. On a rural farm in Vermont — the family doesn’t know exactly where — the doctor told the family that Lavalette, at just 2 pounds, was not expected to live.
Her grandparents, who owned the farm, were used to giving small, weak animals a chance at life. They lined a dresser drawer with blankets, and warmed the snug space with a heating lamp from the chicken coop, taking shifts with Lavalette’s parents, Rudolph and Pauline Roy, to feed her goat’s milk from an eye dropper.
Lavalette lived.
The family’s living situation was unstable; they moved a couple of times before coming to Hartford, according to Lavalette’s younger sister, Cindy Roy, who now works at a Dollar Store in West Lebanon.
At first, they lived on Dothan Road, where their father, Rudolph Roy, worked taking care of Lockwood Reed’s cows, and their mother, Pauline Roy, got a job at the woolen mill. Later, when their father got a position with the town’s public works department, they moved to Elm Street in White River Junction.
Even then, as a pigtailed girl in elementary school, Anita loved animals. She cried when their father decided the dog, a long-haired collie mix named Rex, was getting too old, and gave him away to a family in Royalton. Two weeks later, the dog showed up, a rope around his neck frayed at the end from the 20-mile journey.
They decided to keep the dog.
Anita, the oldest of five children, matured quickly, developing a personality that was fiery and outgoing. Caring for her younger siblings could be a burden, but she enjoyed it — she liked kids the way she liked animals.
On Sunday, when she and Cindy were supposed to go to church, they would instead sneak over to the Polka Dot Diner and spend a quarter to linger over a plate of french fries for the length of the service.
As a young teen, Anita took up smoking and got casual about her curfew, leading to fiery arguments in which she and her father would holler at each other at the top of their lungs. During quieter times, the sisters took turns ironing, or pooled their money to purchase the latest Elvis Presley album for the Victrola they had received for Christmas.
The girls began to take an interest in boys, going on double dates to dances at the VFW, or to the movies, sometimes followed by a parking session up at the Wilder Dam.
Anita began to take on work outside the home, babysitting for neighbors. Then she got what she saw as a perfect job opportunity — work as a live-in nanny in New York state. She dropped out of high school, with her parent’s consent.
Within a year, she returned to Vermont, but not to school.
There were few constants in Lavalette’s life — with limited career prospects and no property, she relied largely on her moxie and strong work ethic to sustain her as she was buffeted by the challenges of life.
For a while, she took a job making polar fleece at Malden Mills in Massachusetts, then moved back to the Upper Valley. She married Donald Lavalette, and had three children of her own. She got divorced.
She took the young kids away from the Upper Valley, where her ex-husband lived, and moved in with a boyfriend in a subsidized housing complex in Winooski, Vt.
She usually had more than one job at a time, at one point putting threads onto bobbins in a mill, and then serving burgers to fast-food enthusiasts.
“We loved it when she worked at McDonald’s,” said her oldest daughter, Cherie Charbono. “Back then they got to bring home the food that didn’t sell. We didn’t care. We’d eat the cold cheeseburgers out of the fridge.”
Sometimes, the kids drew her ire. The girls shared a room, and when they jumped across it, from one bed to the other, it made Lavalette furious. “Stop jumping on the furniture!” she would scold.
But Lavalette’s daughters say they always felt like she put them first, showing them money wasn’t needed for the closeknit family to have a full life.
At a local sandbar, they joined with neighbors to put on barbecues, and Lavalette would tell the kids to get out of the water because their lips were turning blue. Charbono was scrappy, like her mother, fighting with other kids who tried to bully Bridget.
On Saturday nights, they frequented the Catamount Stadium in Milton, Vt., to see the demolition derbies and stock car races. Lavalette and her boyfriend sat on the wooden bleachers while the kids bought french fries and ran around, with, at least once, school buses racing each other around the figure eight below.
One night, the family went down to the pits and met Robbie Crouch, who raced street stock cars. He was fast, and nice, and maybe a little handsome.
From then on, Lavalette cheered Crouch’s car as it whizzed around the track. If any of the other drivers hit him, or came close to hitting him, she would shout at them and shake her fist. It was best to be on Lavalette’s good side, said her daughters.
When Lavalette was in her 40s, things soured between her and her boyfriend. She took the kids back to the Upper Valley, bouncing from one subsidized apartment to the next, facing a new string of jobs that took their toll.
She used harsh-smelling chemicals to polish cutting machinery in one factory, then made ball bearings in another before moving on to pack and lift heavy boxes of dented cans in a chilly grocery warehouse.
She tried to shield the kids from the worst effects of the poverty, but they knew. One year, Bridget Lavalette got the Nintendo she wanted for Christmas, the one that came with a laser-point gun you could use to play Duck Hunt.
“I knew it was secondhand, because it was in just a regular box,” she said. She said she was happy her mother spent a lot on it. “It was all folded up nicely. The cords were all wrapped with those twist ties.”
Lavalette insisted that her children finish high school. One morning, Bridget Lavalette was getting ready for school, trying to be quiet so as not to wake her.
“She wasn’t a morning person,” her daughter said. “It was best to wait until she had her fill of coffee first, before you approach her with anything.” Just as she opened the door to leave, her mother called out to her.
“What?” asked her daughter.
But Lavalette wasn’t angry. She was lonely.
“You want to stay home?” asked Lavalette. Her daughter asked why.
“I thought we’d go to breakfast,” said Lavalette. She still loved the Polka Dot.
The kids didn’t realize it right away, but Lavalette was dating again.
Ramona Weeks says that, in 1982, she met Lavalette at Pats Peak Ski Area in Henniker N.H., which was hosting a dance for the gay and lesbian community.
They had both been divorced. Weeks lived in Canaan, but worked at Pizza Hut in Lebanon.
“We talked,” Weeks said. “Asked each other to go have coffee. It kept growing and growing. It was a big attraction.”
On most things in life, they agreed. They had similar parenting styles and both loved to fish, and camp, and collect baseball cards. But they liked to spar over differences of opinion, and so they came to define themselves by rooting for opposite interests, dividing up all of the major figures in their favorite pastimes.
Lavalette liked Dale Earnhardt, and the Red Sox, and Willie Nelson. Weeks liked Jeff Gordon, and the Yankees, and Johnny Cash. They paid homage to their favorites in the form of yard sale purchases — NASCAR wall hangings, and Major League Baseball jigsaw puzzles, and music albums and coffee mugs and little flags on wooden sticks.
When Lavalette moved into Weeks’ home in Canaan, her kids took their mother’s newfound sexuality in stride, but not everyone accepted it right away. Lavalette’s sister, Roy, said she worked through her negative feelings relatively quickly, but some of their younger siblings struggled.
Lavalette was quiet, but not ashamed, about her sexuality. At a time when the country was increasingly focused on a debate about gay rights, she was unimpressed with politics.
“She was fine with herself,” said Bridget. “I don’t think she really cared what other people thought.”
In the late 1990s, on the advice of a minister from Enfield, they had a marriage ceremony, even though same-sex unions were not yet recognized in New Hampshire.
When civil unions, and then marriages, were legalized, they never went back to the altar.
“We figured it was legal in our eyes,” Weeks said.
Weeks and Lavalette enjoyed their autumn romance. They rented an upstairs apartment in West Lebanon on Main Street, covered the walls with their yard sale purchases, and left it often to play pool, or go fishing and camping. They walked on the sand at Old Orchard Beach.
They piled up little stories to tell each other in later years.
There was the time they each tried to get the other to leave the tent to go to the bathroom first, because they were afraid a skunk was outside (both wound up holding it until dawn).
Or when they fled what appeared to be a rabid racoon, Lavalette breaking the fishing pole as she slammed the car door shut in a panic (the raccoon turned out to be a neighbor’s pet).
The time they set out in a boat that filled with water as they tried to leave the shore, or tangled a line around the foot of an angry duck, or that Lavalette swelled with pride because her name went up on the West Canaan Village Store’s bulletin board for catching the biggest trout of the year.
To daughter Bridget Lavalette, Weeks, who got her an after-school job at the Pizza Hut, fit right in. Once, the two adults woke her up in the middle of the night.
“What?” asked Lavalette’s daughter.
“We’re having cereal,” they said. “Do you want to come have some with me?”
While working at the grocery warehouse in the 1990s, Lavalette was struck by a forklift, disabling her. She used the disability check to help stitch together a living with Weeks in subsidized housing in Lebanon.
As Lavalette scoured the offerings at a yard sale, she kept an eye out for something for her grandchildren.
Sometimes, she was right on the mark. Other times, she earned a roll of the eyes, as when she brought over a plastic Dora the Explorer lamp — “I’m too old for that,” said her granddaughter.
The yard sales fueled Lavalette’s baseball card collection, her teapot collection, her salt and pepper shaker collection, and her collection of T-shirts that had cartoon characters and humorous sayings on them. She wore them, almost exclusively.
“This is something for the swellest, best darn boss there ever was,” read one, “seriously.”
After a lifetime of railing at people around her, Lavalette found that her fiery personality had a limit. She never yelled at the grandchildren.
Once, Bridget’s middle daughter was jumping on the furniture.
“You need to get down from there,” she told her, remembering how the same activity in her own childhood had so angered Lavalette. Lavalette told her to calm down.
“They’re just kids,” she said.
Old Age
Lavalette’s mobility began to decline. She traded her walker for a wheelchair, and began to forget things. In 2008, she moved into the nursing home. Her family didn’t want her to be lonely, so they came to see her, often. Weeks came every day for eight years.
At some point, Lavalette forgot she was a smoker. They never reminded her.
Some days she didn’t recognize her daughter.
“You’re not Bridget,” she would say, looking toward the ground for the little girl she remembered. “Where is she?”
But she did remember the animals they brought to visit her, the dog that jumped on her lap, or the guinea pig that nestled into her, and only her, arms.
“He would curl up on her,” said Bridget. “And he doesn’t do that with us, and we’re with him all the time.”
It was the kind of pleasure that Lavalette had spent a lifetime cultivating.
In 2013, Lavalette told her sister a secret. She said that, when she was young, a man walked into her apartment. She thought it was an accident until he got into bed with her and sexually assaulted her.
“You wonder why I went to women,” she told Roy.
Roy said that Lavalette’s decision to keep the pain of that memory to herself was in keeping with her stoicism and her refusal to admit that she was bothered by life’s woes.
Lavalette died on February 19. Her burial, like her birth, and so much of her life, is a struggle marked by tight finances.
A couple of years ago, told that a burial would cost $8,100, Lavalette began putting a portion of her Social Security payments into a burial fund. Since February, her daughters have continued to make contributions into the fund. Though they are still about $1,000 short, they hope to bury her soon.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com 603-727-3211.