Everyone's life has a story. In "Lives," we tell some of the stories about North Shore people who have died recently. "Lives" runs Mondays in The Salem News.
DANVERS — You've heard of a Dutch uncle? He — or she — is the person, usually older, who insists on candor and asks the tough questions others aren't willing to face.
Meet Irene Levesque, and don't let the last name fool you because she was Babcie, the Polish grandmother with the heart of a Dutch uncle, whether you were her grandchild or not.
She died where she wanted to and when she wanted to on Sunday, Nov. 22, in her Elliott Street home in Danvers — the golden girl in the golden house, fifth house from the light — with her entire family keeping vigil in the kitchen over pizza the night before she died, and that's just the way she would have had it, too.
Her parents came to Salem from Poland before she was born. Good Polish Catholics, they had a big family, five boys, two girls, and Irene was the youngest, the princess.
She was born May 5, 1922, and like a lot of people her age, living through the Depression left her a hoarder for life.
You haven't heard this kind of thing for a long time, or maybe ever, but one of her favorite stories from childhood was about the boy seated behind her in school dipping her pigtails in his inkwell. Hard to pull that one off with a laptop.
She married Rudy Levesque in 1946, and granddaughter Viki Brooks is pretty sure how they met.
"It had to be a blind date," she said. "Nobody in their right mind would have put the two of them together."
Rudy was every bit as French as Irene was Polish, and his family thought he was marrying down.
Well, they managed to work things out and had a typical marriage with its ups and downs until he died seven years ago. Rudy had fallen deeper and deeper into the black well of Alzheimer's disease in his later years and was lost to Irene long before his death.
He was a hard man who expected a lot of his children and grandchildren, and Babcie always ran interference for them.
"Rudy!" she'd yell. "Leave those kids alone, for God's sake."
Simple needs
In 1946, when the couple moved into the only house they'd live in the rest of their lives, Elliott Street was just a dirt path as suitable for horses as automobiles.
Years later, they built a backyard pool, probably to lure grandchildren, and she never got over the fact it cost more than three times the $3,500 they paid for the house.
But she came to love that pool, because it did bring the grandkids and great-grandkids over, and she was content to sit poolside and enjoy their antics. When negotiating the steps to the pool became a challenge, she had a deck built so she could continue "judging" the diving contests the kids put on.
"Watch this, Babcie," they'd say. "Watch this."
The child of the Depression had one fast rule.
"No splashing," she'd command. "It costs a lot of money to keep water in that pool."
Levesque went back to school after her own kids were grown, then got a job with the Internal Revenue Service. The extra money allowed the couple to travel widely, but she might have been equally happy if they hadn't.
"She wasn't an extravagant woman," granddaughter Michelle Zimmerman said. "She was happy having what she had."
She was a killer cribbage player whom no one in the family could beat.
"She cheated," Viki says with mock seriousness.
"No, she didn't," Michelle shoots back.
She didn't let her grandchildren get away with anything, they say, yet they always knew nothing could shake her love for them.
"I know what you did," she'd tell them. "Now go tell your mother before I do."
But when it was over, it was over, and she was still what she always was.
"Babcie had a big skirt," Michelle said. "We could all hide behind it."
At peace
The sun shone brightly into her bedroom the morning of the day death came calling on Irene Levesque, and she was good with it.
She'd been in the hospital six days earlier and was given the option of rehabbing in a care facility. No thanks, she said.
She knew it would be no more than a temporary and possibly undignified stay of the inevitable. She'd had a good long life, now it was ending.
"Do you want to go home?" she was asked.
"I just want God to take me," she replied.
And so he did, peacefully.
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Staff writer Steve Landwehr can be reached at 978-338-2660 or by e-mail at slandwehr@salemnews.com.
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