This week should have been my grandmother’s
birthday. I suppose it still is—January 17th
will always stand out for me, because it was so definitively her day. But while I will continue to celebrate her
every time this day comes around, she is no longer around to be celebrated.
I
have written to honor my grandmother before.
A few years ago I posted on this blog about her, and I have worked up a
series of poems in her honor. But when
it comes to talking about her now that she is gone, I don’t quite know what to say. I did not know as much about my grandmother
as I would like—by the time I was mature enough to see adults as actual people
and not just towers of authority, she was far away from me, both in physical
distance and in her mind. I never got
the chance to ask her what it was like going to college in pre-WWII America, or
how she felt watching friends and family enlist and disappear overseas. I never had the chance to hear about the
culture shock of moving from her South Carolina birthplace to the Connecticut
town where she raised four sons, nor to learn from her an entirely new
perspective of my father and my uncles.
I was never brave enough to ask her what she thought of how the world
had changed around her, nor how she felt she had changed with it.
What
I know of Frances O’Connor is accumulated from impressions collected over the
years of visits. To me, she was Grammy,
a hunched, white-haired woman with a faint Southern-belle drawl and a
distinctive laugh. She was a little bit
deaf, so I spent much of my childhood shouting at her. Grammy was a master at the nagging compliment—“You
have such a beautiful face, darlin’. I
just wish I could see it,” inevitably followed by a suggestion that I get some
barrettes to restrain my curtain of hair.
Another beauty tip I got from her once was “leave your eyebrows
alone. So many girls pluck and wax and
all that silly stuff—your eyebrows are beautiful. Leave ‘em alone.” I’ve followed this advice, which has saved me
a lot of time, irritation, and pain.
Grammy’s wisdom holds true.
Inevitably
thoughts of my grandmother bring back memories of her home. Some people simply live in a house, but
Grammy truly did inhabit that place, filling it from wall to wall with her
color, her grace, and her style. It was
always impeccably clean—I remember her stooping over with much difficulty to
pick up and scowl at an object from her carpet, so small that I hadn’t even
noticed it. Clutter was not permitted in
that house; everything had its place. There
was beauty everywhere—carefully crafted china, small replicas of famous
artwork, crystal charms and handmade quilts.
For a while the house intimidated me, but as I grew older and less
likely to break something, I came to love that house, because it was so clearly
a reflection of herself.
I
sincerely hope that Grammy knew me better than I knew her. For the past few years I have been writing
letters to her, keeping her updated on my news and my thoughts. At the beginning of every month, I pulled out
a sheet of paper, wrote a page full of silliness and some seriousness, folded
it up into a nice card, and dropped it into the mail for her. Though she wasn’t able to write back, it was
a connection that I valued—that even at the distance, even when she was
forgetting where she was or what was happening, I still had a place and
participation in her life. That, I
think, is the most important thing. Even
when knowledge and understanding of another person are lacking, if one is
willing to remain in that person’s life, to be there and to maintain that
connection, there can still be love. And
I think that holds true even now, when she is not there to receive my
letters. I will still think of her
often, still send her my thoughts, and so I’ll never lose her entirely. That will be my comfort when I miss her, which will be often.
Happy
birthday, Grammy. See you again someday.
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