What You Miss

When I was in college, I had to do a writing assignment that was based on a poem. The subject sounded morbid— "What you missed by being dead." I don't recall the poem itself or the author—nor did a very cursory Google search.

But it's always stuck with me, that idea of explaining to a long-gone someone, here's what came after you. And I remember sitting in that overheated, tiny classroom and writing a list of the things I wish I'd shared with my grandma. It felt therapeutic.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with my mom about her. I knew her as a child, and I have many happy memories to treasure from that time, but I didn't know her as an adult. I wish I had. I wish I could see how our relationship would have unfolded. I wish she would have been there to talk with me about fashion. I wish she'd taught me how to sew. I wish I'd gotten old enough to have her use one of her snarky comments on me. I wish, I wish, I wish.

Back to the conversation with my mom. It turned the idea on its head, because I learned what I missed by someone being gone.

Because, for someone who has been gone since October 12, 15 years ago—can that be right?—I learned something about her that I'd never known before:

My grandma had a pretty singing voice, and she could play piano by ear.

I was so struck by that little, glittering gift. A little gift to worry around in my head, to think about, to add to her biography. It's not that often that you get to learn something new about someone who has been dead for so many years—especially a person that you felt you knew so well.

My grandparents never had a piano in their house. The fact that she could play must have been one of those things I never got around to talking with her about. (I do remember her telling me that the clarinet was her favorite instrument and that I should take it up. I didn't. I played flute.) And maybe she sang around me, but I don't recall what her voice sounded like when she did.

I never got to ask her much about her childhood. I never related to her as an adult. Luckily, my mom has a great memory and can recall lots of things that Grandma told her. And then once in a while, a little shooting star straight from heaven lands in my lap and I feel, again, like she's here.

on grandparents

on the way home from the grocery store, i got to thinking. . . and this is the total word-nerd in me. . . why do we call grandparents, grandparents? after all, usually, someone who comes before or above another is "super". . .supervisor, for example. then i started thinking of how funny it would be if we called our grandparents "superparents" instead. it's like they are comic book heroes with extra-special parenting skillz! i had a good giggle, picturing my grandma with a cape with a big capital J on it. yes, i know. big nerd.
but i got around to thinking that i never wrote about my grandparent-filled weekend when we went to south dakota for william's grandma's funeral. i never knew his grandpa on that side; and it'd be a big stretch to say i knew his grandma. but i have gotten to know his mom's parents, and his grandpa makes my heart ache for the ones that i haven't had since childhood.
there is something about grandpas. i want to bake them cookies and make them flirt with me and have them teach me everything there is to know.
william's grandpa's name is ernest, let's start there. perfect grandpa name, right? he's 90 years old, has nine children, and farmed his whole life. i think he still would if he could. but 90 ain't got nothin' on this guy. his mind. . . i actually don't even know any 26-year-olds with a memory like his. he remembers being three years old and sneaking into his dad's sled under the blanket to try to steal a ride into town for candy. that was EIGHTY-SEVEN years ago, in case you need the math. he remembers his dad selling a car in 1925 for $50 and a bad cow. he can tell you all about all about the destruction and aftermath of leaving nine teenager-aged childen home alone on the farm when he finally took his first vacation with his beloved wife, betty. (". . .and the snowmobile, it was up by ted henning's house. . .") he loves baseball and bingo--although he says "that's not gambling, that's recreation!" and he loves his family. he drags out large photo albums and details all their accomplishments and relatives and goings-on over the years in his fargo-like accent (tinged with a kind of stoutness that must be the polish he can also speak). he's a master of the wink. he loves the ladies. the love that he has for his wife (and she has for him) brings tears to my eyes. they have been married for sixty-something years (i hope that's right) and it's like they're still seeing each other for the first time. they live each day trying to outdo each other in acts of kindness. it's the kind of marriage that i think everyone dreams of, once they realize that they too will get old, and hopefully they will still be with that person they fell in love with before they got wrinkles and arthritis, when they still danced on friday nights.
betty tells me, "you know, ernest tells me every day that he loves me. and sometimes he forgets if he said it or not, so he'll ask, 'did i tell you i loved you yet today? well, i love you.' " her eyes twinkle when she tells me this. "i guess that's why he had nine kids."
we had a good laugh over that. but i made this little wish that william and i could still be that in love that far down the road.
it's amazing, the marks that our grandparents leave on our hearts and minds, the ghosty way that i'm still tethered to mine after so many years of them being gone. i can remember sitting at my grandma jeanne's kitchen table with grandpa bill, before we knew he was sick, and him singing 'the three little kittens' to me. and me carrying on, 'no, grandpa, no! not again!' because he knew it drove me crazy. he loved to drive kids crazy. i can remember him showing me the cookie jar and telling me that cookies were not worth eating if they weren't double-stuf oreos. i can remember him taking me to the park with my cousins, and opening up the trunk of his car, and inside it, a cooler. filled with pop. . . grape, orange, you name it. and telling me, "you can have as much of this as you want today." it was like we'd struck gold. he also bought me pink minnetonka moccasins and a care bears necklace for christmas. he really seemed to know a girl's heart.
my other grandpa was very different from my grandpa bill, from what i recall. he was quieter, a bit gentler. he loved golf. he once had a heart attack on the green. . . but finished his game before going to the hospital. (so i heard once). he loved mountain dew and doublemint gum, which he kept on a shelf above his desk. he taped shows for me off the disney channel. . .he came to regret that. annie and the secret of nimh. . . required watching every time i visited. he had a beautiful little rose garden in his backyard, which he meticulously maintained. i can remember climbing the apple tree, he putzing around in the yard. i can remember what his giggle sounded like, and that he always was jingling the change in his pocket. i loved going to their house, there was something so safe and warm there, and like there was so much to get my hands into. i don't remember my grandpas telling me many stories about growing up or any of those things, yet i still feel like i carry them around with me.
and if i'm marrying into this family, then they are kind of my grandparents too, right? i'm going to soak up as much of it as i can. tell me your stories, so that i know what it was like. and how i can live a life as decently, as love-filled, as miraculously, as you have yours.

molly mail

well, today marks a new, crazy day: molly got mail. seriously. from petsmart. that super makes me giggle. it was the only thing in our mailbox, which made me laugh even harder.

since my parents are out of town, my grandma is taking molly during the day. my grandma had a full run-down of their day's events together--two big walks, followed by snacks, and she had picked me a bagful of tomatoes out of her garden. sweet! my grandma is pretty awesome, if you don't already know her. thanks, gram.

it was gorgeous out today, finally, and wow did that ever help my mood out. the one concerning thing: it's only 8:30 and it's dark out. like streetlamps are on. nooooo! nooooooo! i am officially protesting the end of summer. like, totally protesting. it's not going to happen, people.

pretty quiet day in the neighborhood, today. that's not always a bad thing, either.

tonight i took molly out for her regularly scheduled short walk, and i looked up into our place. i could see our magenta wall, covered in framed photos done mostly by william, i could see the brick wall, i could see our super kickass light hanging over our island. it looked warm and cozy and hip and home-y. i stood out there, with that perfect 70-degree breeze blowing, and smiled. it was nice that i was looking at my own home, and i was happy.

a long one

this is a story i wrote a few years ago for an assignment. i've always wanted to do something with it but i just haven't found a place. so here it goes. it's long. sorry. also, there's more editing and rewriting i'd like to do.

Grandma Schwartz stopped by Soft Batch cookies when things got bad. It used to be that after school, she had oatmeal-raisin cookies and juice boxes for an energy refill in her kitchen, while she and my mom talked. But one day after school, my mom and I found her pushing her ninety-pound frame behind a hot pink toothbrush, around the kitchen sink.

“Bugs!” She told our puzzled faces, disgusted. “There were bugs all over the sink and countertop.”

“No there aren’t,” my mom told her, already half-weary.

“That’s because I just got rid of them all,” she replied.

I remember the self-righteousness, the triumph, and the disgust, in her voice. I was ten. There were no cookies that day.

Marion, my mom’s mother, had been diagnosed in 1981 with Parkinson’s disease. Little did we know Alzheimer’s disease was also winding its tentacles around the folds of Grandma’s brain. IT would have been 1991 when the “ants” appeared in her kitchen. That was the first time I remember my grandma losing her grip on reality.

My mom called the doctor’s office, thinking Grandma was being overmedicated. The doctor broke the news. This was the “beginning of the end” for Grandma; it would only get worse from here. “I’m sorry. It’s the hardest thing I have to tell people,” he told my mom. The news itself wasn’t as hard to take as the years that followed.

Further complicating matters was the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in my grandpa, her husband. While she was alive, he held on bravely, taking care of her as best as he could. The complication was his inability to speak—he was losing his language skills. We managed, and they managed all right for a while, but public outings became impossible after a snowy night in November.

One evening, around the dinner table, I imagine my family was doing its best to avoid the topic of my grandparents’ health. It had already consumed our family, especially my mother, who cared not only for her husband and three children, but also her own parents. In the middle of our dinner came a knock at the front door. A knock on the front door always meant a stranger.

Bad news came in the form of a police officer. Only my grandpa accompanied him. Grandma disappeared. My grandpa explained, slowly and brokenly—more frustrated with his inability to find the right words rather than the disappearance of my grandma—that they had gone to Perkins for dinner he had left her at the door to park the car, that when he went into the restaurant she was gone. He gave her a minute. Perhaps she was in the bathroom. But no, she did not appear. He tried talking to the employees at Perkins. They thought he was senile, that his wife did not exist. He begged them to find her; they told him to go home. An officer finally stepped in, but my grandpa had gotten panicked. Words came less easily the more panicked he became. He navigated the officer to our house to get my mom, his translator.

My mom went with the officer and my grandpa; my dad, brother, and I got in our truck. The five blocks to Perkins felt like miles. We jumped out upon hitting the parking lot and began looking for her. My dad headed around the back of the building and as his form disappeared around the brick, his voice broke the tension.

“She’s back here!”

I began to run, but my brother, nine years older than I, grabbed my hand and slowed me down. I realize now he was trying to protect me from what could have happened behind Perkins, what she could have looked like.

It was all so long ago, but it still hurts like today. Details get hazier as time goes on, but feelings do not. Time passed in that odd, off-kilter, fast-but-slow-motion way. The light falling over my grandma was orange, snow scurrying in clumps left, then right, then falling to the ground. I could only see the top of her round, gray hairdo from where I stood. In that moment, I thought my grandma was dead and I felt the dizzying drop she must have felt as she hit the pavement. I spun around, looking for someone, feeling helpless. My brother threw his arms around me, spinning me to him. I hid my face in his jacket, bawling already, my breath irregularly making steam in the air around his lapels. He murmured that we were OK until the ambulance came and we went home.

Her temperature had dropped. That was all. No broken bones, no hypothermia, and no blood. Just the overnight observation hospital stay. With a thin fall jacket, Grandma lay in the Perkins parking lot for more than an hour as waitresses and officers alike told Grandpa that he was confused, that grandma was dead—or maybe never existed—and he should go home. I’m sure he knew then he couldn’t take care of her much longer.

It wasn’t the last time she’d wander away, but it was the moment when I realized Grandma wasn’t going to get better. She was not going to start sewing Easter dresses again, she was not going to sing along to Annie with me. She had wandered away because she was confused. Maybe she thought Grandpa left her.

Right around the time of the fall, my grandma had started calling our house several times a day, furiously claiming my grandpa was cheating on her. If he took the garbage out, it became “his ironing” in her eyes and he professed she didn’t care; she hoped “that woman” did his ironing anyway. She was irrational as it was, but his inability to communicate only made it worse. He’d gesture with his hands, say things that didn’t quite make sense, and then giggle—nervously—because he felt inadequate. She read this as him hiding something, as thinking it was funny that she was mad.

What I did not know was that my grandmother had taken to wandering at night as well, a symptom of Alzheimer’s. Sometimes I think victims of these diseases wander because they’re looking for answers. They wonder why they float from complete lucidity to utter madness. They look to find a way out. Grandpa played the night watchman, sitting in a chair all night, to make sure she wouldn’t leave the room. He tried being the angel of answers to her. Perhaps if she saw him there, she would feel safe and at peace. Then she could dream instead of searching.

OF course, one night, Grandpa fell asleep in his chair, and Grandma started looking. The phone rang at our house, late at night. A high school kid had found my tiny grandma inside a snow bank in front of their house. He picked her up and brought her into the house, waking my grandpa. I am sure it was Grandpa who called. That was the last time Grandma got a chance to wander. In January 1993, we decided it was time to move her to more capable hands.

Even then, when she experienced extensive dementia, she knew where she was going. She would look us straight in the eye and ask why we were doing this to her. We weren’t just doing this to her, though. It was doing it to us, too. Everyone was sad. We were all confused. But when she’d call me by her twin sister’s name, or when she’d tell us how she was lost at the St. Paul Depot, we knew she had to be at the nursing home. There were times when she would ask about my Home Ec class and whether I’d gotten her talent for sewing (I hadn’t). Those were times she knew, at least partially, the life going on around her.

Those moments of lucidity, or at least the moments where we perceived lucidity, lessened by the day. At first, she would fade from reality and her imagination quite often, sometimes in the same sentence. After a few months, it was almost complete nonsense. We’d paint her nails or comb her hair or talk; she would interrupt with these grandiose stories without endings. By the end, she was not talking at all. I don’t know which was worse.

The last time I saw my grandma, she was tinier than ever. She probably weighed about seventy-five pounds. She had choked at dinner and was unconscious. The nursing home called to let us know we should come visit her. My mom and I drove over to the home. The room was darkened. There were machines. She seemed asleep. I could barely see her body under the blankets. We stood at the end of her bed, neither of us knowing what to do. I don’t know whom to comfort, Grandma or Mom. Eventually, my mom told me to kiss her and tell her that I loved her. So I did. My mom did the same.

At thirteen I remember thinking how unfair all of this was. We were supposed to have grandparents forever. At the time when most children push away from their parents, I was finding the value of family. I turned around to face my mom. She was standing in the doorway of Grandma’s room, the light from the hallway deepening the shadows underneath her eyes, around her cheekbones. For possibly the millionth time since the beginning of grandma’s sickness, I cried. My mom hugged me to her, asked me not to cry, not to talk. “Maybe she can still hear you,” she said. So I held my breath and I waited until my mom could leave that night. It was only a few more minutes—those same minutes that passed in the Perkins parking lot. Too quickly, but almost in slow motion. I heard my mom’s heart beating. At the time, I thought it was breaking. But I realize now that it had been already broken by too many days of listening to fantasy, too many nights of worry. Three years previous, the doctor had told us it was the beginning of the end. October 12, 1994, was the end.

I woke to my mom’s crying the next morning. It was about 5:30 a.m. I knew Grandma had died before I even got to he kitchen to find out. The only thing my mom said was, “Oh honey.” My mom and dad and I hugged, and we cried, but I think everyone was a little relieved. It had been so long and everyone had suffered. All our energies went to Grandma, knowing that she wouldn’t get better. This kind of knowledge drains a person. It drained our family. I’m sure in my Grandpa’s increasingly more quiet way, he was drained, too.

Grandma was partial to turtles and butterflies. Turtles decorated their house everywhere: little plastic ones, carved wood and stone ones, painted ones. Colored-glass butterflies graced her windows, found themselves in the patterns of her clothing, rings upon her finger. I wore one of those rings, blue and large, on my slim, eighth-grade finger. No one could have gotten it off.

That spring, I was confirmed in the Cathedral. It was a day I had hoped Grandma would see. My godmother brought me a necklace as a gift—a tiny Black Hills gold butterfly charm strung on a chain. I wear it every day. I’ve broken three chains since I got it. I firmly believe it’s my link to my grandmother. It’s comforting to know she’s fluttering around outside, watching over me.

My senior year of high school, my English teacher asked me to get up and explain, for an assignment, why I loved butterflies. I explained that some butterflies migrate more than 3,000 miles a year, from Minnesota to South America and back. Those tiny, delicate, graceful butterflies fly much further than you’d imagine possible. Their wings are so thin, so powdery; their bodies are so small. Three thousand miles seems too far for such a fragile life. But they do it. Because they are strong and much tougher than you would expect. That was Grandma. She was strong. Much tougher than her four-eleven frame suggested. And beautiful. My hope is that I am that way, too. Tough and beautiful. Graceful and strong. Maybe it will come down through the genes.