I’m starting to lose the memories I have of my grandmother. This January, she will have died thirteen years ago—or will it be fourteen? I remember the morning she died; I still get sick to my stomach thinking about how I didn’t get to say goodbye because she didn’t want me to see her so ill. January eighth. I last saw her fifteen days prior. Did she know then that the battle with her tumors was lost? Did she regret smoking all those years after watching her first husband die of the same cancer that suffocated her?
These are not the memories I’m afraid of losing. I’d gladly give those up if it meant I could hold onto feeding blue jays in her big house on Elm. I can remember-fuzzily- the cupboard where she kept the short can of planters peanuts to throw to the birds from her porch. Sitting out there with her taught me how to be content not doing much of anything.
She kept a bowl of Werther’s Original candies below the cupboard but I cannot recall anyone but me actually eating them. Around the corner, by the garage door, she kept the dust buster I’d use to collect non-existent particles of dust off her immaculate floors; the same floors on which she followed me around, wiping scuffs my patent leather Christmas shoes left behind when I was very small. Whenever I cook, I clean as I go; I cannot stand a pile of dirty dishes because that’s the way Grandma taught me to work.
And her den—brown carpet and a set of bulbous, yellow glass grapes on the coffee table. This room is where I was teased for not being able to tell my Uncle Bob and Uncle Dick apart one year. I lost a game of hangman to my cousin Allison when I was young. Her husband joked, “Really, what’s a kanana?” for __anana.
My grandmother’s car was a luxurious Lincoln Continental with enormous cream-colored, leather seats and power everything. We’d back it out of the garage into the alley and go to Rosemary’s for sandwiches and sundaes. I have always hated the way that ice cream shop smells but I still go there because it reminds me of her.
My grandmother kept a beautiful garden: roses of all kinds, fruit bushes and trees, cacti everywhere. It was my grandma who made me love persimmons and taught me how to eat them properly. It is nostalgia that makes me sneak into my parents’ neighbor’s garden to take persimmons from the abandoned backyard.
What I cannot remember, though, is the sound of her voice, or the smell of her perfume, and –worst of all—I cannot recall what she looked like without the aid of a photograph. I see my grandma reflected in my mom and especially my aunt, but I can no longer close my eyes and see her. Even when I recall in detail the blue jays, the kitchen, a dozen other memories from my childhood, all I see is the memory of the event—her face is hazy, her words echo in my own voice instead of hers, and her perfume eludes me. And this makes me sad, guilty. How have I forgotten these crucial elements about the woman who influenced so much of my life? When did she slip away from me so unnoticed?
A woman—a stranger at a jewelry store my grandmother loved—told me that my grandmother was one of the last true ladies in the world. It is true; she was a regal, worthy woman. It would please her to know that I still remember to talk from my belly and not my throat like a ninny. It would displease her that I sometimes express my anger in a string of dirty words. I hope that despite my poor choice of angry vocabulary, she would be proud of me, of my life, of my beliefs. I know we’d disagree on politics but I hope she’d be happy I have conviction.
I would hide my tattoos from her.
And I know she’d be so proud of my husband. She would think him a fine man, a gentleman. She’d be happy I chose a man with “no holes in his face” or “pants hanging around his ankles.”
Now, I find myself oddly grieving her death again after all these years. She would be 90 this September and I regret that she’ll never know my new child—currently no bigger than a raisin. I grieve for my new baby, for the absence of his or her great-grandmother on my side. I wonder what she would want to be called.
So this woman who once forbade me from naming a future daughter Lois (her cousins apparently called her Low-ass, makes me giggle every time) might just have to resign herself to the idea that this present baby of mine—husband agreeing and assuming said baby is a girl—will bear some kind of family name in memorial to the woman who had such a role in molding me into the woman I am today. My maybe-daughter won’t have the opportunity to know this woman but she’ll know she carries the name of a woman who would have loved her so much.
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