Twenty-eight hundred miles away, my grandma is dying.
My mother's mom grew up in Kentucky, a state all green with pasture grasses and leafy trees, all white with crosses and steeples. I know nothing of her childhood but recall being told she'd never gone to school past the sixth grade. Yet I also remember her telling me she'd attended high school. I do not know how she felt about school, or what her favorite subject was, but I recall her careful cursive on the birthday cards she'd send with five dollar checks inside, and I imagine she earned high marks in handwriting. I know when she was grown up she worked for J.C. Penney, I think doing something with sewing. I know she birthed five children and lost her husband when a drunk boater slammed into his dinghy on a fishing trip, casting him overboard where his head struck a rock. I do not know whether he died from blood loss or from drowning. I was two or three years old and know him only through pictures of him holding my infant twin and me in his lap, his brown eyes--my mother's eyes--shining.
My earliest memories of my grandma are not of her but of her home in California. I remember Easter egg hunts with my siblings and cousins in her backyard. We'd play hide and seek and challenge each other to cartwheel competitions on the grass. I remember the sliding glass door that led from the living room to the back patio, how heavy the door felt when I closed it on my thumb, how the nail crunched and turned indigo and in the days following cracked and peeled like the egg shells I'd helped dye.
After my mom and dad divorced, my mom moved us across the country to Florida. After two years of sticky heat and daily thunderstorms, we moved again, north to Pennsylvania, where my mom re-married. We settled into a large house in the woods, and sometimes my grandma would visit for weeks or even months at a time, acting as a babysitter. She was there while my mom and step-dad honeymooned in France. She was the one who told them, the afternoon they came home smelling of exotic places, their luggage bulging with souvenirs, that I was too sick to go to school. We had been watching Wheel of Fortune, one of her favorite shows ("programs," she would have said), and all I wanted to do was fall into that colored wheel and spin out of that moment and into my fifth grade classroom where we were learning about evaporation. Grandma was calm when she told them about my fever and my knee, which was the size of a cantaloupe. I wonder if it was her calmness that allowed me that morning to finally, after months of hiding my hobble and diminished appetite, admit I was too sick to walk and needed to stay home. If my parents hadn't flown out of the country and left me with my grandma, perhaps I would have hidden the truth until the Lyme Disease finished ravaging me.
I do not remember eating cookies and drinking milk with my grandma--it just wasn't done--but I know she liked to sneak ice cream for herself when we were at school. She ate rice puffs and Lactaid for breakfast and was as serious about water as my alcoholic stepdad was about martinis. She'd often enlist one of us kids to refill her water for her, which drove us crazy. We'd mumble to each other over the kitchen faucet, "Why doesn't she get it herself?" Sometimes she'd reprimand us for sitting down on the couch with too much gusto, claiming we would destroy the integrity of the cushions. She'd cover her ears and tsk tsk if we dropped the toilet seat instead of setting it down gently.
She kept her mind busy with word search books, Jeopardy, and the bible. She wasn't one for exercise and loathed hot weather because she hated to sweat, but she would perform her daily ritual of retrieving the mail even on her summer visits.
We didn't talk much, but I remember the way her eyes sparkled bluely (yes, bluely) when she'd laugh, an open-mouthed laugh that would send her rocking and reeling, and she'd clasp her hands and then pat the knee of whoever had caused her laughing fit. She laughed when no one else was laughing and was never self-conscious. We didn't share the same sense of humor, but her laughter would often cause my siblings and me to cast knowing glances at each other that would inspire our own laughter.
I never learned how to cook, sew, knit, bake, or anything else I might have expected to learn from my grandma, but there were these learning moments, like the time I caught her humming and singing to herself in the kitchen, and the tune was familiar, but there was something slightly off. "Eenie meenie, miney moe," she sing-songed, and then I had a swift real-life history lesson with the next lyric, one I'd never heard before. It seems no one had told my grandma that the children's counting rhyme no longer went that way. But I learned in that moment how covertly, without accountability, this country moves to cover up its own shadow.
Grandma delighted in shiny, pretty things. She loved the colorful lights and tinsel festooning the holiday season, and she passed her appreciation on to my mother, who began collecting crystal figurines when I was a kid, a hobby for which I was grateful for I never had to think too hard about what to get her for her birthday. I bought a glass unicorn for my grandma the last Christmas I flew home, and she told me she'd put it on display in her room. It wasn't an expensive gift, but my grandma spoke with genuine appreciation of how it would catch the light.
My cousins knew her better. They remember watching ice skating with her on t.v. and sharing cinnamon candy. They remember her joyous dancing and singing and her small, warning slaps on the knee, touches so gentle but clear, you knew not to press further. One cousin and his wife, parents to five children, named a daughter after her, Ella Mae.
Grandma's sister-in-law, whom I met once at a Thanksgiving family reunion, remembers my grandmother being like a mother to her. And she remembers with great fondness the fishing trips she'd taken with my grandma, my grandpa, and my mother, aunts, and uncles.
I haven't spoken to my aunts and uncles about grandma's passing (she is slipping now, her breaths shallow and arriving softly and slowly, the way she would move through the rooms of our house on her visits). But I remember the way my uncles, her burly children, all full of their mother's twinkle and boisterous laugh, would tease her when the family was together. They loved to get a rise out of her, maybe because she was so expressive, wearing her disapproval like a shawl when her sons and nephews talked about lofty subjects like flatulence, or when they planted whoopee cushions and fart machines around the room, loudly rejoicing in their victims' pink-faced surprise.
My mother. I don't know how she sees her mom. It is almost too personal for me to ask. It is like when people ask me if I am close to my mother. Mother. How do you say goodbye to the woman who gave you all she could give but who might not have given you what you wanted or needed? How do you say goodbye if you are still holding on to something you could never have? Who will my mother be when her mother dies? Who will I be if I don't forgive my mother before her breaths start to fade?
My grandma is slipping away in an unfamiliar bedroom in my mom's brand new house two hours away from the old one in Pennsylvania. The cancer the doctors found in her breast a few years ago, the cancer that took the boobs she said she was done with and wouldn't miss, the cancer that sidestepped treatment and spread to the bones in her shoulder, the cancer that metastasized to her liver, the cancer is stealing her breath, and she's sleeping now, having stopped eating days ago, having stopped rising to use the restroom or to watch the birds and squirrels chasing each other out the window. A water glass sits nearby, and my mother tries to stop checking on her mother every ten minutes after the hospice nurse tells her to space it out, and my sister who drove two hours from her apartment in New York last night to be with Grandma sits now by her side and plays oldies music and reads her messages the family is sending, and my brother is there in his heart after having visited over the weekend to help with the move and to say goodbye in the gentle way he has, and I am here holding vigil on the coast where she raised her family, I am here wondering if she is teaching me even now, if in her passing I will find the strength to let go, to forgive my own mother before she moves on.
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