Grandma Mary

I wrote this essay some time ago and decided to go ahead and post it in honor of Mother's Day, in memory of my Grandma Mary.

A handful of powdery grey ash in a plastic baggie tied with a rose-colored ribbon. Eighty-one years of living and three weeks of dying, packaged neatly like a bag of jelly beans. I keep it in my glove compartment, this incomprehensible statement of finality. It’s as good a place as any. Maybe, someday, I’ll come upon the World’s Best Garage Sale, and scatter her there. She’ll have finally reached her nirvana.

It was snowing, that day I saw her last. I brought the children in to see her individually. They kissed Great Grandma goodbye, protected by their innocence. The immensity of the moment stole my voice, my words. Would they remember this? Would this image be burned into their memories, indelible, defining? Would they remember her at all?

I looked at her hands to avoid her eyes. Farm girl hands, she had. Big, useful, used, crepe paper wrinkles and prominent veins. A mother's ring with three square rocks. Her mouth spoke simple words but the intensity in her eyes spoke forgiveness and something else, something I couldn't name, something that stabbed my soul. Her old-lady perfume was there, somehow, in the air around her deathbed.

We didn’t say goodbye. I walked out of that room, my heart in my throat, lead in my gut, down the long hallway to the door and out into the cold February day. We drove away in the silent falling snow, me and my family. The lead in my gut would stay and nearly drown me.

Her dying was brutally fast and torturously slow. Brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, in and out, saying goodbye, listening to her death rattle, smelling the cancer overtake her. I didn't go. I couldn't go there. The dreaded emotions would overtake me. Instead, I paced, 150 miles away, trying to prepare for what I knew I wasn’t ready to handle.

It came on a Sunday night. Your Grandma died at about 7 pm tonight, the email said. Tidy black words on the luminescent screen.

The euphemistic "celebration of her life" was held a week later. No casket, no urn, just flowers and a framed photograph, the one she hated. A minister was there, someone who didn't know her because she hadn't worried a bit about getting her ticket punched. He did his thing, a eulogy-in-a-can. She didn't think many people would come to her funeral. I wish I could tell her she’d been wrong. She'd laugh. Oh, you rotten little kid, she’d say.

Then it was my turn to publicly say what I privately couldn't even comprehend. I stood before the crowded room, note cards in my hands. The sea of expectant faces numbed me. Somehow I knew this was my penance, how I could apologize to her again for missing her last months.

I told her story in her own words, gleaned from old letters, saved emails, in her rambling, disjointed style that always made me laugh. Linda took me to Wayne’s Star Market for groceries today and I waited in the car. It makes me so angry when people leave their shopping carts in the parking lot instead of putting them away! I had a hotdog and bun for lunch, it was very good.

Emails from her Mailstation in her little apartment, the Mailstation I was so proud of her using. Thank you for the bakery stuff, it was delicious. Myrtle doesn’t like divinity, you know, so I ate hers.


Her goofy songs. Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the mooorrrrnniiiinnnng.

I tried to explain how contradictory her character was. Severe in expression, often caustic in her words. So very patient, content to sit for hours working on her “crossword puzzle books”. Deep inside, a buried softness and overwhelming shyness, forced into a nearly unbearably social life by her marriage to an extrovert. The original queen of denial. Her cancer had been diagnosed ten years before, well advanced, already eating through the skin. Impossible to ignore, but she had.

Every bonus year after her diagnosis, she threw herself a birthday party. It was my job to bring her the cake—or two, if a lot of people were expected. I’d ask her what she wanted on her cake. Well, she said, happy birthday Mary, I suppose!

Somehow, somewhere, I forgot that they were bonus years. I let a family disagreement come between us. Her last Christmas, I didn’t see her. I stayed away with my pride to keep me company. A few weeks later she was in the hospital, and a week after that, transferred to the dreaded nursing home to await her death. So little time to make things right.

Today, I hold in my hand an index card. At one time this card was in her living hands. Hilda’s Chocolate Cake, it says across the top in her strong cursive. I picture her in her favorite chair in front of her TV, Wheel of Fortune blaring, absentmindedly working on her recipe for me between vowels and consonants. We must have been in her thoughts, Hilda and I. Hilda, big sister, gone for 50 years already, and me.