SHELBY- Obituaries are not auto-biographical, they’re written from the perspective of loss and retrospect, and Germaine Celine Lockman is difficult to describe. I suppose the task at hand, telling strangers and acquaintances, people who aren’t close enough to already know the news, that Germaine Lockman passed at 88, surprisingly to her daughter and granddaughter, who thought she would pass at 95, is easiest. The facts of Germaine’s death are that these two cared for her when the reality of age declined her autonomy, one thing after another: her hearing, her memory, her driving, her cooking, and lived together with her, in some form or another, almost all their lives, the three taking care of each other. They held both her hands as she sounded and exhaled her last breaths. But obituaries are also about recognizing the person, not only their death, and this is one of the impossible tasks Germaine Lockman leaves with her family.

To make it easier, one can start with the obvious which was Germaine was not from Shelby, where she died, but rather, The Kingdom of Hawai’i, born in Maui, raised in Honolulu. Though she might have been an ordinary Auntie on the Islands, ordinarily dispensing of and immersed within the Aloha spirit, where she made sense, where she was part of the coconut and ti trees and lava rock and roosters and accents and Asian-Pacific ethnicities, she was, on the mainland, someone from another world, one that she adored and was protective and prideful of. Among the easier things to say about Germaine was that she loved to cook and cooking was how she told people about herself and where she was from and what the ordinary people there were like. Her meals were geographical and historical. She would often cook a meal, without recalling the name of the dish, instead lecturing those dining on the origins of the technique, the poverty that inspired the people who’d invented it. Fittingly, her private and economic life centered food, working in kitchens, waiting tables, teaching Oriental cooking lessons, selling groceries (Germaine’s Oriental Grocery Store and Catering, Mansfield, Ohio). She’d devoted herself to telling and re-telling, through her words and her lifestyle, stories about home, colonization, difficult relationships, survival, resilience. Germaine was fascinating and charming because she was strange, as she would pridefully call herself, and uncensored, and such an unapologetic way of living is stunning, intriguing, and from an old lady, as she grew to be, endearing, maybe inspiring, and almost always evoked an unexpected laugh from strangers who’d probably expected much less. Germaine is remembered across the Continental U.S. (she lived all over the country at difference points of her life) and in the blue Pacific in memories of someone who was not shy, hilariously crass, who took care of any animal that would let themselves be nurtured by her, who spoke her mind, and who was committed to her independence. She had a beautiful smile and an unmistakable laugh. She yawned loudly, had a precise and reliable intuition, enjoyed the smell of her own farts, noodles of any kind, watching TV at top volume, taking the backroads (which she referred to as shortcuts but were not always such), and learned a lot from learning how to take care of herself. Much of her life was spent remembering what even her brain disease could not take from her, which was an unforgettable childhood and middle life. It may be too assuming to say she wasn’t ashamed, since we all tend to be, but she was maybe less so of things that many are. She was, then, a breath of fresh, honest air and will be remembered as a Legend by her daughter, her granddaughter, her friends, her family’s friends, her cat, and strangers she charmed at restaurants, grocery stores, hospitals, and in stories told by her family. A person who, in all her subjective glory, took up space in the world and didn’t mind doing so.

Services are entrusted to Clay-Barnette Funeral Home & Aquamation Center www.claybarnette.com