
I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother, who died earlier this month.
Or more accurately, I should say: since earlier this month, when it happened, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother’s death.
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It’s hard to know how to process this death, because, to be honest—and I can say this in part because few people from my “real life” read this blog—my grandmother was a very difficult person. It’s hard to know how to mourn a person who was difficult in her particular way. Throughout my life I felt my efforts at knowing her were persistently repulsed. Now she is gone, and I never will.
What to do with that?
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For the last sixteen years, ever since my grandfather died, my mother was her mother’s primary caretaker. This has consumed an enormous amount of my mother’s time and energy: an amount that often seemed to me unfairly gendered. My mother is the only daughter in a family of brothers, and my grandmother belonged to a generation that unabashedly upheld different standards for women and girls than it did for men and boys. So even though my mother did so much more for her mother than either of my uncles did, my grandmother was still dismissive of her daughter’s intelligence and abilities, while on the other hand privileging any opinion expressed by either of her sons—or, indeed, by my father, or even my male partner. This arrangement seemed to me, I think reasonably, to be radically unfair.
It also meant that, whenever I went home to visit, my reconnection with my parents was punctuated by mutually awkward, time-limited interactions with my grandmother. I’m almost 37 now, and my grandmother moved north when I was a sophomore in college. That covers a lot of ground in terms of my life, if not in terms of hers. She was there to comment on my college papers (”Oh my, people are still reading Jane Eyre! Why would you bother, I read that in high school.”). She was there to sniff at the shortness of the skirts I wore (”I hope you are wearing LOTS of underwear with that!”). She was there to deride—or, if not deride, at least fail to grok—all my long-term creative projects after college, be they musical or fiber-arts-based (”That seems like MUCH too much work to be worth your time”). She was there to comment on my jewelry, which I never intended anyone to take for valuable (”Costume jewelry. Imitation emerald: not. Worth. A thing.”) She was there, disapproving yet weirdly proud, when my partner and I announced that we were going to have a commitment ceremony—an event she called a wedding. “You’ll change your name,” she said, like it was a demand rather than a question. “No,” I said. “I’ve lived almost thirty years with my name; I’m attached to it.” “Well!” she said. “If you want to be a [LAST NAME] all your life!” She delivered this line, in front of my father and two of my father’s siblings, as if being a member of my father’s family were a fate she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. She probably didn’t mean it that way.
Maybe she did!
Who can say.
She gave me her wedding ring, anyway. I’m not a big jewelry person but it was beautiful: they bought it in 1948, but the engagement band (later fused to the wedding band) looked vaguely Art Nouveau, and although the diamonds were modest, they were well proportioned in their settings. I wore it for almost three years and then took it off when I was let’s-just-say-divorced; and later I moved five times; and now I’m not sure where it ended up. Strangely, a couple of days before my grandmother had the first of the series of heart attacks that killed her, I was struck by the urge to search for it; but it wasn’t anywhere I looked. I’m tempted to feel guiltily sentimental about this. But there’s one thing I know for sure. If my grandmother were alive, she would berate me for losing it for one reason and one reason only: because the ring was appraised at $600, and I might need to sell it someday.
After all, she has a point. $600 is $600. Having $600 and no ring would be better than having no ring and no $600.
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These days I work for an organization that operates out of two major regional offices, a Northern California regional office and a Southern California regional office. For my first three years of employment with them I worked out of the Southern California regional office; and then, a few months ago, I moved; and now I work out of the Northern California regional office. When my coworkers heard that my grandmother had died, the offices sent around separate condolence cards; I received the Northern one first. I only just got the Southern one the other day. It was particularly comforting because I’d worked so closely with many of the signatories. In fact, my SoCal coworkers had hunted down a couple of former employees with whom I’d worked especially closely, and got their contributions on the card. I found this really touching.
One coworker, who I like a lot and with whom I have been working lately on a project, wrote: So sorry to hear of your grandmother’s transition. Despite how genuinely poignant I found the card, I couldn’t stifle my immediate impulse to laugh at this comment. “Transition” reads to me like a Human Resources euphemism. Like someone fired my grandmother for her poor performance, or let her go due to an unexpected shortfall in the budget. Like her position, unfortunately, had been terminated, and so she would have to move on. Or else like she herself decided, voluntarily, to take a more advantageous position at another organization.
That last possibility is probably closest to the truth. She hadn’t had much use for life, for some years.
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I felt bad about laughing at my coworker’s inscription, because I know that many people genuinely do view death as a transition. Lots of folks believe that we living people reside in one space and the dead continue to exist in another. Personally, I don’t particularly share that belief. I pretty much believe that when you die you’re dead, at least for any discrete or individualistic definition of the concept of “you.”
I know this sounds cruel, but honestly, when I think of my grandmother, I hope I’m correct in my metaphysical instincts. She was a very unhappy person; she spent basically her whole life miserable. She told us all, many times, that she was ready to cease. I wouldn’t like to think that she’s now being forced to be miserable somewhere else, to hold herself together against her will, still confined to the boundaries of her inviolate ego. I hope, for her, that she persists no longer—or else, that she’s free.
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My grandmother and I had very little in common, but there were a couple things. We were born within a few days of each other, and we were both Tauruses. I don’t believe in astrology any more than I believe in life everlasting, but my long-time ex, who believes in it with a seriousness that never stopped surprising me, once did my whole chart. Not only is my sun in Taurus but also my Mars and Venus. I’m not sure what that means, but what I took away from the experience is the idea that I am emphatically bull-like. My grandmother also struck me as an interpersonal bull. I’ve often thought that maybe it’s why we didn’t get along: head-butting.
One time, though, when I’d just graduated from college and didn’t yet have a paying job, my grandmother—who usually relied on my mother for both inspiration and execution when it came to gift-giving—took it upon herself to make me the graduation present of two months’ rent on my apartment. She got in touch with my landlord and everything: it was all taken care of. I told her, the next time I saw her, that only another Taurus would understand what a perfect gift that had been. I don’t think my grandmother believed in astrology, either, but she seemed to relate to what I was saying. She agreed that we Tauruses share some special understanding the value of rootedness. Of belonging. Of homecoming.
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I guess that really, a lot of what I’m thinking about as I think about my grandmother’s death is my own relationship with my mother—and with mothers, in general. In addition to the woman who raised me, I’ve had a number of surrogate mothers over the years. This number includes, for example, my childhood piano teacher, an 80+ year old woman who told me, at age 11, that in order properly to play Chopin I should go out and have love affairs in order to get my heart broken. It also includes the mother of my former long-term partner—the one whose name I never took—who I used to refer to as my “mother-out-law” due to living in ill-defined liminal sin with her son. I’ve been thinking about her lately, too, since I’m currently knitting a sweater out of some yarn I bought during a trip with her to San Francisco about 15 years ago.
I had almost as fractious a relationship with my mother-out-law as I did with my grandmother. It was the same kind of mutually unconnective dynamic, in which we repeatedly tried to make contact over the gulf separating us, and repeatedly washed up on opposite shores. Once, when I was still a baby of 22 or 23, my mother-out-law straight-out demanded of me: “Give me intimacy!” I may be misremembering, but I think she actually stamped her foot when she said it, though she didn’t raise her voice: in her milieu, that wasn’t done. When this happened, I didn’t know how to respond. I was shocked and uncomfortable. I had no context for what she meant when she said “intimacy.” I was too young and not sufficiently self-possessed to tell her: That’s not how intimacy works.
I feel like, if that thing with my former mother-out-law happened now, I would know better what to say. But these days it’s less of an issue. I don’t expect that my current mother-out-law will ever demand undefined intimacy with me as her rightful due; unless maybe I’ve told her this story and she’s decided to tease me with an engineered jolt of déjà vu. But if I’m gaining on my surrogate maternal relationships, this whole thing has brought home to me that I still have no experience doing what my mom just did: helping a parent to die. And I will have to, at some point. I am an only child, and pushing forty. I have no context for that kind of intimacy, either, but make no mistake: I will have to give it.
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I remember lying on my parents’ bed, one night when I still lived in Portland and had driven across town to visit them. My mother was lying next to me on the bed, talking on the phone to her brother. There had been some crisis with my grandmother. There were often crises with my grandmother, and the burden of dealing with them usually fell on my mother, because she was the only sibling who lived in the same city—or indeed, the same state. I remember lying on the bed and listening to my uncle’s canned-sounding voice through my mom’s little cell phone speaker, arguing that if my grandmother was getting too difficult then my mother should move her down closer to my uncles. Or that she should hire help. My uncle said that he would help out, if she needed money. There was no need to say this part on the phone, but my uncle was a childless widower who earlier in his life had made a lot of money and invested it well. So he could afford to hire a nurse, above and beyond what my grandmother could pay for herself.
My mother said that she wouldn’t abandon her mom. She said that my grandmother had been abandoned over and over again by her own mother. (This is true: my great-grandmother was a flapper and a passionate hula dancer and guitar player and a heavy drinker and a prolific lover and a terrible, negligent parent. I take after her, except that I never had a child.) My mother said that her mother had never known what it was like to have stability until she married my grandfather; and that then she was too young, and couldn’t trust it.
And then, my mother pointed out, my grandmother had suffered other abandonments. Her eldest son had been killed in a plane crash in his early 20s, and after that my grandmother, as the cliché goes, was never the same. My mother, that day on the phone with her brother, said that she wouldn’t put my grandmother through that again. She wouldn’t abandon her. My mother put out a hand and held onto my ankle, which was the easiest part of me for her to reach. Her voice was unsteady. She said that she couldn’t imagine losing a child. She said she just couldn’t imagine that.
We were all silent, trying to imagine it: my mother, her brother, and me.
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Sometimes I think about how my grandmother would have responded to someone demanding of her, “Give me intimacy!”
I literally cannot fathom it.
Yet somehow, trying to picture the scene still makes me laugh.