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.

Stories

I caught up with a source today--someone I spent a lot of time with before my layoff. Together with her cooperation, I wrote the most important story I've ever written.

Tonight we just had tea and I dropped off some of her photos and some extra copies of the magazine she appeared in. We talked about politics, her community, what's sh'es been doing, what I've been doing. It was lovely.

And as I left, I had the same thought I've had over time, but I felt it more strongly tonight: I want to write good stories. REALLY GOOD stories. Stories about different cultures, about different lives, stories that change the way people see life. Even if it's a miniscule shift. I'm not expecting a Nobel Prize overnight. But I need to write stories people care about. I need to write stories I care about. I need to write stories that shape the world, whatever the size.

I need to find a way to do it.

The Storyteller

"You can search far and wide for the great stories, but in the end, the best ones come to you."

--The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine, page 99

Stories: I am a bundle of raw nerves. Tensed. Ready. I'm waiting.

Recommitting to the Intention

Lying on the floor on a rubber mat, breathing deeply, and emptying out the contents of my brain. Reverse thinking. No doing, besides breathing and letting go.

Then, suddenly, I sweep my arms over my head and stretch from the tips of my fingers to the tops of my toes. Arch up and bridge out, raising and lowering my arms and spine as I breathe in and out and find my zone.

Heart beating a little faster, standing now, sweeping arms up overhead, now bending in half, suddenly pushing a leg back to a lunge, palms pushing against the floor, now the dreaded plank, and we freeze, holding ourselves up, the beginning of a pushup. Now, lower, and halfway up into Cobra, then Up Dog, now curling toes under, pushing sitting bones up, blood rushing as I hang my head and hold it, breathing, waiting for the next gentle suggestion.

Shaking it out, pushing into Crescent, arms overhead, pivoting, Warrior one, two, three, my thighs are burning, but as I hinge forward that my back lays flatter (though not yet as flat as I'd like), and I am touching the floor with certainty, not grazing with fingertips, not hovering six inches above the floor. Boat pose, leaning back but not relaxing now, no, shaking, a thin sheen developing over my whole body.

Hip flexors, calves, lower back, relaxing the shoulders down, rolling the neck, tipping the head back, spine crackling.

Every Tuesday night, my yoga instructor asks us to commit to our intention. It can be a simple one. No lofty goals needed in an hour of yoga, a nice reminder to someone like me, someone as flexible as a two-by-four.

I commit. I commit. I commit to each pose because I want to be healthier, more flexible; my stomach likes it, I can tell. I commit to letting go of the day, of the six days leading up to this hour. I forget it. I indulge, and I work at it.

I will likely never be able to sing or play piano, despite my deep wishes, or paint a beautiful portrait, or change the world, or win a Pulitzer or Booker prize. But for one hour, I can commit to breathing. Just breathing.

I need to commit to writing. I relax into it, but at the same time, if I'm serious, I have to work at it, invent synapses, create bridges, reach out through my whole body, exercise vocabulary, strengthen my mental reserve, push myself to the limit. I have to commit. Instead of my fingers finding the floor, they find the keys, and hopefully, eventually, they are skyward, and I am saying, even if I'm shaking, finally. I'm where I want to be.

As my yoga instructor reminds us each week: If you could call it perfection, what would it look like, feel like, be like? In this moment, call it perfection, and know that it is enough.

Pray For Me

This week ahead includes a LOT of writing, on two long stories in which I have done a LOT of reporting. It's really important to me that they both come off really well in the first turn-in, so pray. Pray. OK, if you don't believe in God (which is totally OK in house o' Willikat) could you at least do one of those "Hey, let Katie rock the writing today?" into the universe? Thanks.

I am working on overcoming bride brain to just write, write, write my little butt off. I got my errands for today out of the way early, dressed and ready early, and coffee in hand. I even dropped Mo off at my parents' house (man, she loves my dad, I think more than she loves me) so she wasn't here for snuggles and walks.

I'm going to turn on my magic writing music (Belle & Sebastian, Beck's Sea Change, Billie Holiday) and write.

writing it all down

i'm starting this thing where i'd like to be writing here every day. even if it's a short entry.

william's grandma and grandpa hung calendars on their wall and recorded details of days' events, even if it was just the temperature and the amount of fish they caught. and now they have like fifty years of days where they can look back. their own farmers' almanac. something, that i'm sure will be much sweeter for their relatives to look at and remember.

back in the day, i blogged anonymously, and after a while, it was sometimes up in the two-to-four entries a day category. not all of them were good, but it was good exercise, good therapy, good practice. and now i look back and there are definitely moments there that i wouldn't remember if not for my writing. which is sad, because some things are so joyful, some are so awful... how could i forget? of course, that was anonymous blogging, and so the nature of the blogs change once you know that a)people are actually reading you, and b) that you might be writing about life experiences that might affect them--those that you know and love. that's ok though. sometimes i get afraid my memory is getting worse, which upsets me further when i think about that two of my favorite people in the whole world died from illnesses that eventually completely erased their memories and reprogrammed them with incorrect ones.

memories aren't accurate anyway. and when we write about them, i've learned, we are, in a way, cannabalizing our own memory, just like how when you play a game of telephone the words change. it's better than letting all those things get buried.

i just read one of my favorite blogs, from the back nine, and she reveals her mom's diary pages, which were often just four or five fragmented sentences that bring floods of memories back for her. or even small insights into her mother in a way she wouldn' t have understood at the time. (here i'm just conjecturing--i just feel i might be able to get that somewhere down the line).

in any case, the challenge is on for myself. i need to do more writing, be more creative, nurture that. i do love blogging, i do love writing, and therefore, i should do more of it. your comments and emails egg me on further. thanks for those. keep them coming.

ok, so on the list today besides that:
i hate money. hate it, hate it, hate it. i have to get better at managing it (although i've come a long way already, i still have a ways to go). i also need to actively seek out some freelance jobs because i need some extra cash lately. weddings! expensive! no matter how you cut it! plus a girl needs some fall work clothes, and stat. well, sort of stat. it's still august, i know.

also. i need to find some ways to focus all my nervous and bad energies. i would like to, besides write more, which often helps... work out. i know. i hate working out. i think i hate it more than the average person. but i'm getting to an age... agh... where i think my metabolism is slowing down. and no, i'm not heavy by any means, but i am out of shape and getting not toned and i'm stressed out all the time and it's good for me anyway, so i should find a way to do it, even when i'm tired and want to veg (which is all the time), and find something that's marginally fun. i think yoga and pilates would be perfect for my energy and frustration problems, but i also need to take brisk walks, do some resistance training, and maybe get some tennis in (i do so love tennis). but it's a lack of time and ... will power, i guess.

william is right now watching a show called fat march. he says "you can't even make that shit up!" is that why i'm thinking about this?

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.