A grandmother's life alters course

<p>This is not how Marilyn Collins thought 2010 would look.</p><p>Her home in Bodega Bay — the two-bedroom place she bought with her husband 12 years ago — was intended for a quiet retirement after years as a nursing instructor in Southern California.</p><p>Collins' life today is a lot of things. Quiet isn't one of them.</p><p>“Sometimes I turn my hearing aids off,” the 65-year-old said, smiling as she twisted her fingers over make-believe hearing devices as one of her grandsons vied for her attention.</p><p>On Dec. 2, the 65-year-old former department chairwoman of Citrus College's Health Science Department gained full custody of her grandchildren — 8-year-old quadruplets whose mother died after a brief battle with a rare cancer this fall.</p><p>“Our new year started Oct. 14,” Collins said of the day her daughter, Lisa, died.</p><p>Alone since the death of her husband, Jim, in 1998, Collins has lived with Isaac, Joshua, Diego and Danielle nearly full time since their birth to single-mom Lisa in 2001.</p><p>Lisa's husband had left her before the kids were 6 months old.</p><p>A trained nurse with a patient streak a mile wide, Collins helped with every aspect of their childhood.</p><p>“I had a home in Claremont, I had a home in Bodega Bay, but I was living with them because she needed help, she had four babies,” Collins said.</p><p>The co-parenting arrangement went on for years. In early 2009, both Lisa and her mother decided they would be wise to have a legal document in place that would offer security for the kids should something happen to their mom.</p><p>Born profoundly deaf and dealing with a spate of injuries and illness, Lisa called Legal Aid of Sonoma County in early 2009 to help start the legal paperwork that would give Collins custody of the kids should something happen to her.</p><p>Then she got cold feet.</p><p>“Like anybody with a kid, you think you are young, nothing is going to happen to you,” Collins said.</p><p>Lisa set the issue aside.</p><p>After Collins headed north to live full time in Bodega Bay, Lisa and her children moved in, too.</p><p>The two-bedroom home on the western side of the bay is jammed with toys. The kids sleep in pairs — with grandma or on cushions at the upstairs bay window. They are never far apart.</p><p>Lisa slept in a bed off the living room.</p><p>Collins, who described her home as “bursting at the seams,” had recently helped Lisa buy a small home in Forestville.</p><p>It needed work: paint, land clearing and cleanup.</p><p>Last February, as Lisa refurbished her Forestville house so she and the kids could move in, she developed a cough.</p><p>She thought it was bronchitis and took antibiotics, but the cough and fever remained.</p><p>“She attributed it to the fumes,” Collins said.</p><p>On July 6, she was diagnosed with a cancer that had already spread into her lungs and lymph nodes. Surgery was not an option because the disease was too widespread.</p><p>Lisa died Oct. 14.</p><p>In her grief, Collins initially couldn't remember who had helped Lisa start the paperwork for legal custody. The kids were in legal limbo, with no official guardian.</p><p>“I finally remembered Carol. They had the paperwork on file,” Collins said of Carol Campbell, a volunteer advocate for Legal Aid of Sonoma County, a nonprofit agency that provides free legal services to low-income families and children.</p><p>Campbell got to work.</p><p>“She could certainly keep them, but where she runs into difficulty is doing the things that parents usually do. You can't get a birth certificate, you can't get a passport,” Campbell said.</p><p>Doctor's appointments, insurance issues and school decisions can be a legal quagmire for an adult who is not a child's legal guardian.</p><p>Campbell attempted to find Lisa's ex-husband — a man Collins describes as absent but who left her with concerns when he was in the picture.</p><p>The specter of his return hung over Collins for weeks while the legal system ran its course.</p><p>On Dec. 2, she got the call.</p><p>“It was just relief,” she said. “I know they will be safe here.”</p><p>She said she tries to manage her emotions as she cares for the children. “We are sad and we are happy,” she said. “I do (cry) every now and then, but you know, it's a circle of life, and we have always been realistic and we love the kids.”</p><p>Collins often uses the pronoun “we.”</p><p>The kids sometimes slip and call her “mommy,” along with “grandma” and “gramcracker.”</p><p>“I love my grandma and I like to hug her a lot,” Isaac said, curled up on the couch, deep in Collins' embrace.</p><p>Just after their mother died, Isaac said he cried every night.</p><p>“My grandma said ‘Just talk about her,' and I said ‘OK,' and I did,” Isaac said. The crying stopped.</p><p>They attend play therapy once a week with other kids who have lost family members.</p><p>Santa Claus brought all four kids fleece blankets imprinted with a large picture of their mom. They sleep with them.</p><p>Danielle, a slight kid who is half the size of her brother Diego, sometimes wears Lisa's perfume, but she turns to Collins for support in a house full of boys.</p><p>“When the boys are being not nice to me, she says they are being big nuts,” Danielle said.</p><p>Loud and bubbling with motion, the house is full of life, even in the shadow of death.</p><p>This is not how Collins thought 2010 would look, but she is not looking back.</p><p>“Years ago, I had thought about doing some mission work. I went to Azusa Pacific for a bachelor's degree in nursing and we had to do a mission to graduate,” she said.</p><p>She enjoys travel and had joined groups in preparation for good Samaritan mission work in retirement.</p><p>That has all changed.</p><p>Collins is OK with that.</p><p>“These little monkeys are now my mission,” she said. “And that is that.”</p><p>Staff Writer Kerry Benefield writes an education blog at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat</p><p>.com. She can be reached at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@</p><p>pressdemocrat.com.</p>