I’m relatively intellectual these days when it comes to the inevitable, such as death. It’s easy to say that she left years ago, with a brain damaged by experimental drugs to curb the pain from her rheumatoid arthritis, and the subsequent damage from the meningitis and the stroke. She wasn’t what I remembered as a kid - proud, fiercely proper, always wearing perfectly pressed clothes, hair coiffed, with impeccable makeup and earrings that always matched her flip flops. Age, pain, endless medical issues, they stole away pieces of Grannie over the years, and before I knew it, the woman that argued with Gramps was no longer the one who danced with me to Frank Sinatra or who gave me a Thesaurus and Dictionary as a high school graduation present (I still have them both).
Grannie’s been gone for a long, long time. And it’s best for her that she goes. It’s the kindest thing to wish for her because there is nothing that dulls the pain, and there are machines breathing for her and she, if she still possessed the faculties she had 10 years ago, would be horrified by her current situation. A woman who can’t dress herself? Shocking. But I’m human, and I’m selfish. I want one more conversation with the woman who cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner after I moved to Miami. I want to eavesdrop on her conversations with my Grandfather where she says that she’s so proud that I’m making on my own, but won’t tell me to my face because my head might get too big. I want to steal a moment at her jewelry box, where she plied me with pink plastic, but because I loved her so completely, I let her hold the shiny baubles to my ears.
She always wanted a girly granddaughter. Thank god Lex is around.
It’s not something I talk about regularly, but I lived with my grandparents after my parents divorced. My mother had reconnected with the man that would eventually be my stepfather, and for reasons I only am beginning to understand, Mom left me in Tampa with Grannie and Gramps while she secured our home and livelihood in Alabama. I’d already moved through one school that semester, she was trying to keep me from shifting again. Grannie and Gramp’s neighbors took care of me in the early afternoon while Grannie and Gramps worked. And when they came home it was “E, how was your day at school.”
She held me when I was incapable of saying the word “father.” I had a hard time articulating my emotions back then, and I think I still have that problem. But I always felt like Grannie had that space, that energy, that made being angry okay, or being sad, or hurt, or whatever - it was all justifiable. When I lived with them, she made sure I had a safe space in which to heal, room to cry, and rage, and laugh. And I spent that time in a kind of emotional bubble, which would burst in the most spectacular way when I moved back home with Mom and my siblings.
Grannie is my only grandmother. My stepfather’s mother died several years ago, and due to my problems with him, I never allowed a real relationship with blossom with her. My father’s mother is somewhere in California, but I haven’t spoken to her since I was a teenager. But Grannie’s seen the drug addict, the pierced-face, the tattoos, the boyfriends (only 1 - but she loved D), the best friends, the goth girl in big boots, the raver in big pants, and the adult I would learn to be.
She walked during my wedding. I joke that I had to have that whole goofy thing for her, and honestly, she was one of the main reasons D and I did that. But she walked, for the first time in months, that night. I don’t think she’s walked since. And it was beautiful seeing her, dressed in yellow, smiling, exhausted by the chaos. She couldn’t go to Lex’s wedding because of the altitude, and the fact that she couldn’t fly anymore, but she was more than ready to go to Orlando. And she didn’t blink at the fact that I wore a black dress and carried a bouquet with a peacock feather. For all her judgments, I like to think she accepted who I am.
I don’t really know where this post is going. I guess I am just walking through the blue, trying to find her smile in my memories, and the sound of her voice as she hummed, rocking me into a blissful sleep, after wiping my tears and my worry away.
She is the matriarch I will never be.
