This morning as I sat down to breakfast I got a text from my cousin: our grandma is on her deathbed and doesn’t have much time. Suddenly my veggie benedict felt obscene; I still haven’t finished breakfast.
My initial reaction was that I’d be right there to say goodbye, but the more time I had to think about it the less I wanted to go. I’d walk through the door into a house that used to feel like a nest but that I would no longer recognize, then I’d walk down a hall into my grandma’s bedroom where she wouldn’t be cheerfully folding and ironing my grandpa’s clothes, but breathing her last breaths.
I decided I’d rather hold on to my childhood memories in a vivid way and not diminish them by undoing all that I remember, because I don’t remember much.
I’ll go back home for the funeral. I’m not going to go home for this.
I’ve spent the rest of the day trying to untangle this knot that’s taken up residence in the depths of my torso. My wife keeps asking how I’m doing and I keep saying, honestly, for once, “I don’t know.”
I’m sad, yes, but I also feel defeated. Yes I want to cry, but I also feel that thirteen-year old me climbing up those knots in my chest, searching for an escape and wanting nothing more than to run. To choke me as she exits my throat, sees the daylight, declares her freedom and runs, but doesn’t know what she’s running away from or running towards and, besides, her lungs are my lungs and it’s exhausting to even think of allowing her to run so far.
So for now she’s leaning against my heart and demanding answers and I wan’t to tell her that she has to quit leaning like that into my chest but I also don’t have the heart to tell her that in 27 years from now she’ll still be in the dark.
So I let her persist.
She is my last living grandparent.
My maternal grandpa was the first to go and he was the strongest man I ever knew. Could be stoic almost to a fault but when it came to his grandkids that man would light up like a Christmas tree, and he’d hate that comparison because he didn’t much care for Christmas.
A couple years later his wife, my grandma, died, and I’ve written about her before a few times so won’t do that here, but she was the North Star of my life.
Then a couple years later my paternal grandpa died. He was the kindest, softest man I will ever know. He developed Alzheimer's later in life but his emotional memory stayed intact for many years. He would see me and his face would light up, his eyes would glisten. He wasn’t quite sure how he knew me but he knew that he adored me and that I meant a lot even if he had no clue how he knew me. My grandma would stand there, awkward and tense, hoping he didn’t make a comment that would embarrass them both, and grandpa would just smile. Grandma would give me a quick hug and kiss on the cheek and then get grandpa out of the situation, her anxiety through the roof.
And now she is almost gone and I struggle to say who she was.
I can never have a cup of hot chocolate without thinking about her because that was one of the indulgences she allowed us. And whenever I spent the night at her house, she greeted me in the kitchen by giving my back a good scratch with both hands, up and down, with the smell of hot cocoa coming from the stove. As much as I love a good back scratch today, it’s always a disappointment compared to the ones I got from grandma.
And then there’s bandages. My other grandma was a nurse so you’d think she’d have the corner on that market, but it was this grandma who I think of every time I put on a band-aid. Her fingers were always warm and she had a way of pulling the band-aid over a wound that made it magically better.
Every year before Halloween, she put on elaborate make up and a prosthetic nose and a dark cape with a hood. We’d be sitting at home after dinner like normal and my grandpa would show up and say he was just at a ward meeting at our church so he thought he’d stop by and say hello. Of course we knew what that meant, but it still never failed to terrify us when the doorbell would ring and dad would open it to a very scary witch.
She’d come into the house and point her long, green, crooked finger at each one of us and ask if we’d been bad. We knew it was grandma but we also couldn’t be entirely sure. Grandpa would say, oh my, I can’t be around a witch, I better go! and his car would seem to zoom off and we knew he’d never leave grandma like that so maybe it wasn’t her. And after tossing maybe poisoned candy at us, the witch would cackle her way out the door and then skirt away in the dark, and again, we knew it was grandma but we also didn’t know.
I could write a couple more paragraphs about the memories I have about her but… they’re not about her. Just like I knew it wasn’t an actual witch in our living room, I knew my grandma was more than just a grandma.
But I’ll never know if she knew that, too, or if she just convinced herself that was good enough.
*****
Back in the bad old days, women (and men) had very specific roles they were supposed to play. My mom’s parent’s shunned such orthodoxy while my dad’s parent’s were bound by religion to exemplify it. That probably would have been okay for my grandma in a different life, but in this life she had pretty severe depression. She was never treated for it back in the fifties and sixties while raising seven kids because it wasn’t a thing women were allowed to have.
So, despite her being a textbook grandma, she wasn’t always the best mom. I’m not going to stress this point because it’s the one thing I actually know about her and I’m going to keep it to myself- send her to the 13 year old me who’s got a tight grip around my esophagus and is threatening to squeeze.
I do know that my grandma started taking anti-depressants in the eighties. I wasn’t supposed to know that but I overheard a lot as a child. I didn’t know that she had a brother until I was about nine years old. I thought her mom, my great-grandma, was really sweet until I overheard my dad and his sister telling my mom horror stories about her. (I was invisible as a child, I really did overhear everything I wasn’t supposed to.)
But that is all I know.
I can’t tell you anything about her other than this.
And I’ve known her my entire life.
*****
I’ll never really know why my grandma essentially disowned me for so many years, but I am pretty sure it’s because I am gay. It started when my parents divorced; that was scandalous and of course (in the eyes of my dad’s family) it was my mom’s fault.
But I still got birthday cards and an occasional reminder that I had grandparents on that side of the family until I came out, then all contact ceased. I was angry and hurt about this for a lot of years, but then one day I realized it wasn’t necessarily that simple.
It was just unpleasant to think about. There is no reason to wrestle with something when you can just will it out of your life, and I believe that’s where my grandma fell. I know that my grandpa would have never let me shunned but, Mormon beliefs be damned, by grandma DID dominate that relationship and I know that anything that struck her as unpleasant had to be ignored.
But nine years ago I was invited to her 85th birthday/family reunion after years of not being acknowledged. It was weird. Awkward. I hadn’t seen these people since I was 12. But after saying hello to my favorite people my grandma appeared and her face lit up like my grandpa’s used to when he saw me. We hugged and she was so small and fragile in my arms.
She spent a good hour standing next to me, unsteady, with her arms around me as a crutch, literally looking up at me and telling me how beautiful I was, and how when she was young being short was the way to be for a woman but now to be beautiful, you had to be tall. I smiled and told her I always wished I could be as small as she was and we looked at each other and laughed and said at the same time “you always want what you can’t have.”
And then we laughed some more because we hadn’t seen each other in over twenty years but said the same thing at the same time.
I know she is so much a part of me. I feel it when I am full of rage but hold myself together and pretend I’m not. Just like I know my grandpa is part of me when I melt upon the sight of my nieces and nephews, and my other grandpa is a part of me when I run to the library because there’s something I don’t know, any my other grandma is a part of me because, well, everything else about me.
But I don’t know her at all.
And now I never will.