Regina Wanda Twardowski

Visitation, Tuesday January 25, 2022 from 4:00PM-8:00PM with sharing of memories at 7:00PM at Harry J. Will Funeral Home in Livonia.

Funeral mass, Wednesday January 26, 2022 at 11:30AM (in state 11:00AM) at St. Kenneth Catholic Church :14951 N Haggerty Rd, Plymouth, MI.

Please join the family immediately following mass for a luncheon at the Italian American Club of Livonia 39200 Five Mile Rd, Livonia, MI 48154.

In lieu of flowers please instead consider a contribution to Manoogian Manor or Angela Hospice. Both took great care of Regina.

How do you sum up the life of a woman who lived nearly 96 years? Well, she didn’t like old people much, for starters. “They’re boring,” she explained, sometime around age 93.

If you were lucky enough to be related by blood or had been linked even briefly to the massive extended chain of family friends that she and her late husband, Leo Twardowski, had spent decades soldering to their clasp — friends of her brothers, of her husband’s brother and sisters, of her nieces and nephews, of their kids, of her own kids, of her own kid’s kids, of her Gladwin neighbors (including, of course, the Gladwin neighbors’ kids, too) — well, she’d make an exception: No matter how old you got, you were interesting to Regina Brzozowski Twardowski.

And you were loved.

You got a card on your birthday, often with five crisp dollar bills in it, every year — and even some years after the curves of her elegant handwriting began to bend and quake. Whether you were 2 or 72, you got a gift at Christmas. Often several gifts, sometimes dozen, always beautifully wrapped.

You couldn’t enter her home without being fed. You couldn’t leave without Country Crock and Cool Whip tubs full of cookies and golobki and mashed potatoes, kielbasa and kapusta, piled on your front seat. You could try to leave, several times, but she’d inevitably remember a snack she forgot to pack and run back in to get it before kissing and hugging you and reminding you she loved you at least a dozen times more.

Only when you finally convinced her you had enough sustenance for the three-hour ride home would she let you get in your car. You’d drive up the long dirt driveway to the even longer and rutted dirt road, then turn left at the mailbox. Just before the berms along the fields rose up high enough to hide her well-coiffed silver head from view, you’d look back to wave, and no matter the weather, there she’d be — standing outside the house her husband built, beside the garden tchotchkes she lovingly planted all around, at the place we all called home, waving back.

But while you were there in her home, she asked little of you. Only one thing, really: to sit at her kitchen table with however many or few aunts, uncles, cousins, and kids were already wedged around it, to eat and drink, and talk.

Regina wanted to know how you were. What you’d been doing. How was work? Your mom? Your best friend since third grade? Her no-good husband? Did you want a ham sandwich? Cookies? A Manhattan? Fill your belly, then tell her more. Here, bellied up to whatever seasonally themed tablecloth lay over her table in that carpeted kitchen, you mattered. Your minutia mattered.

She’d be thrilled if you stayed up to play cards. Delighted if you made it past midnight with her. Willing to drive her to the casino at 1am? Give her one minute to find her 16-pound purse and tear a lucky blue dot from the latest issue of her Enquirer.

Leo might start snoring at 8pm, but that’s when Reg was just getting started. She’d tell a great story if you asked her, but mostly, she wanted to hear your stories. And so you’d all pile around the table to delight her, to talk and laugh, and laugh and drink, and talk and laugh and drink some more.

You loved the sounds of her daughters’ hysterical bird-like shrieks as they ratted out their eldest and baby brothers about hijinks from 50 years before, the sight of Reg’s shoulders quaking while tears ran down her cheeks as she laughed, too. There was usually at least one grand- or great-grandkid on her lap; all the rest squeezed between uncles and cousins and aunts, perched on countertops and mismatched stools, leaning against the rare sliver of a knick-knack-less wall. Some of them weren’t really your uncles or cousins or aunts, but they’d been part of the Twardowski fold so long, you forgot how to tell the difference.

Maybe none of us heard it at the time, below the pfftfffft of cards being shuffled and the cracks of beer cans opening, above the shrieks and howls of laughter, and sometimes even angry shouts (we were a real family, after all), the imperceptible sound of the links in Reggie and Leo’s chain, growing longer, becoming stronger, fusing all of us together.

Eventually, you’d all stumble off to bed. She always had a bed available — whether a real one with freshly laundered sheets in a guest bedroom, or one made up of sleeping bags and Bekins pads on a couch or floor. She kept an extra extra bed, always neatly made up with a dust ruffle and pillows, next to the china cabinet in her dining room. That bed slept one but sat at least four — essential for her Saturday Thanksgiving dinners, when up to 30, maybe more, gathered thigh to thigh and back to back around her Gladwin dining table, card tables, and tablecloth-disguised plywood sheets laid atop sawhorses.

Regina loved pretty things. Long after age forced her into Velcro Mary Janes and elastic-waisted pants, she still managed to dress like a classy grand dame, with just-right touches of earrings, necklaces, and scarves always matched to tidy blouses, flattering glasses, and berry-colored lipsticks she never minded smudging on the cheek of anyone she loved, which was all of us.

It’s not hard to imagine her as the curvy, porcelain-skinned Polish girl with dark brown eyes that Leo fell for in 1942. Her friend, Gigi, one of Leo’s sisters, introduced them. She and Gigi worked together at Federal’s department store in Detroit then; Gigi’s mom insisted her daughter bring her girlfriend home for lunch. As Reggie told it, Leo walked into his mother’s kitchen one day, and she immediately knew: She was going to marry that guy.

Except she almost didn’t. He was going with another girl at the time — Jacqueline Something, or as Reggie plainly explained once: “A drunk.” But the girl who could drink Leo under the table wasn’t the problem; his sister Gigi was.

One day Leo squeezed Reggie and Gigi into the front seat of his father’s car to teach them how to drive. After a lengthy demonstration, he leapt out of the driver’s seat to go around to the passenger side and give Reggie the wheel. That’s when Gigi told Reggie to hit the gas. She did, and they left Leo in the dust. Until well into her 90s, Reggie swore that she’d never seen anybody as mad as he was that day. She said he took her home without a word; never even said goodbye. She cried her eyes out for days, thinking he’d never call again. But Gigi told her, “Eh, don’t worry about him.” Gigi was right.

A couple days later, Reggie said Leo showed up and told her, “You ever do that again, you’ll never see me again.” So she didn’t. A month later, on her birthday, on the way home from the 8-mile Elias Brothers restaurant where they’d had their first date, Leo asked her to marry him.

That October, wearing a dress her mother had hand-sewed with lace they’d spent months gathering from a neighborhood effort of traded war stamps, she did.

Over the next 60+ years together, Leo and Reggie laid the first five links in their chain: Gary, Donna, Barbara, Sharon, and Billy. Those kids would give Leo and Reggie countless more links of extended family and family friends to adopt, plus eight grandchildren — Bryan, Lynda, Michael, Aaron, Ryan, Jonathan, Jillian, and Elliott — whom they loved to spoil rotten and let run barefoot and wild around the woods and fields and pond at their Gladwin home. Eight great-grandchildren would follow, some of them lucky enough to know and love both Leo and Reggie, but all of them — every last one — loved.

If one thing remains of Regina on this earth — besides her descendants, blood and otherwise, whom she’s fed and nurtured, mothered and made beds for, listened to and held, and laughed and cried and shopped and gambled with, then sent on their way with plastic tubs and hearts and bellies full to bursting, it’s this: If you were lucky enough to know or be known by Regina Twardowski, you always had a home to go to, an extraordinary meal to eat (and more to take with you), a mom/grandma/great-grandma/auntie who wanted nothing more than to hear about your life and to know you were happy.

Because if you knew her, you mattered. And whether she was sitting across her kitchen table or is gone from this earth, you can always, always know — without a single doubt — you were loved. You were a link to the family that she and Leo built, and so you will forever be part of their family. And you will always be loved.

Regina Twardowski was predeceased by husband Leo, grandsons Bryan Twardowski and Michael Heyer, and is survived by her children Gary Twardowski (Kathy), Donna Marie (Heyer) (Greg Skindzier), Barb Roussin, Sharon Turek (Larry), Bill Twardowski (Linda). Also nine grandchildren and eleven great grandchildren.