I'd built up so many bitter memories of missed birthday parties, piano recitals, gigs and school plays that my heart had no room to receive anything else from her.
She had grown cantankerous, temperamental in her old age. I remember one afternoon I drove out to see her after she had cataract surgery, I took her out to lunch and spent the entire meal listening to her complain about her children, her sister, her grandchildren. What a disappointment we all were to her. What a waste, her family had been.
Needless to say, none of that was fun to listen to, but I dismissed it. In one ear and out the other; I had learned long ago not to need anything from my grandmother. Not validation, not praise, not support, not appreciation- I knew better than to expect anything more.
We finished our meal, settled the bill, and drove back to her house. Hugs, kisses, "Love you, grandma," "Love you too, sweetie."
And then I drove away.
She passed away a few months after that. She took a very bad fall, and was unable to reach a phone. She laid on the floor for several days before my aunt discovered her, and she was rushed to the hospital, very weak, very sick.
A week later, she died.
Her body was under complete attack from lung cancer, 60 years of nonstop smoking, an enemy that cannot be defeated.
I watched her breath her very last, surrounded by all of her children, their children, her great-grandchildren. Both of my sisters held my hands tightly as we watched her small chest heave and rattle and tears ran down all of our faces. Death is final, no matter what your relationship. I wish I could say that her passing had caused me to feel differently about our relationship, and that the finality of her death caused me to miss her in some ways.
To be truthfully honest, not much changed after her death. I still felt angry about how our time was spent together, or rather, how our time wasn't spent together. After her memorial, life went invariably on, and I haven't really looked back since.
Except for today.
Today I found myself driving around the town she had lived in for most of her adult life, the town my parents grew up and went to school in, found each other and fell in love and got married in; the town I spent so much of my early childhood in.
Our family dentist operates out of that town, and there I found myself after an early morning teeth cleaning, driving around just to stir up memories.
It's a sunny, early spring day. The temperature is surprisingly warm, and cherry blossoms are just starting to bloom. It's a year ago this week that my grandmother passed away, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been thinking about her a lot the past few days.
It started out as a drive throughout the downtown city square, listening to an old Tony Bennett CD from the 70s that had actually belonged to my grandmother. I nicked it from a stack of CDs that my dad brought back from her house in the weeks after she died, when her kids tried to sort and sift through piles of her belongings and divvied up who would take what of the smaller, less valuable items.
Just something to remember her by, I had thought to myself as I tucked it away, under my arm. I do actually remember running through the halls of her house as a child, the voice of Tony Bennett drifting throughout the rooms, warming the house from the inside out.
I kept the CD in my car, and today was only the second time I've listened to it since her passing.
Pretty soon, I found myself driving past the house she lived in most recently, and the house my grandparents shared when grandpa was still alive. The house with the in-ground pool and a full-size entertainment bar in the back room.
Memories flashed back from driving up her driveway the night of her memorial, and of the slideshow my cousin's daughter had put together in her memory. The albums and photographs we had all compiled and arranged into a sort of shrine to her life, the hugs and the strange feeling of gathering the entire family into her house without her presence in our midst.
I remembered summers spent in the pool out back, where I learned how to dive off a diving board, and where I graduated from water wings to diving goggles.
I remembered wind chimes. I remembered her letting me help plant flowers in her garden.
When I got a little older, she let me put makeup all over her face and do her hair.
I remembered how the kitchen counters were always messy and how the dishes were never done.
I remembered the two separate bedrooms, one for my grandpa, and one for my grandma, and I remembered never understanding why they were never in the same room at the same time.
As I passed both of the houses, and continued on my way homewards, I could feel the sensation of emotions starting to well up, but no tears came. I felt a little sad, a little nostalgic, a little sense of wonder, a little remorse for the fact that the past cannot be changed or altered.
My CD had run its' course, and I was hurriedly leaving that town far in my rear-view, so I decided to leave that moment in the past and switched out Tony Bennett for a little Taylor Swift and broke out my sunglasses.
As I drove, I couldn't shake the memories of my grandmother, though. I thought about her life, where she came from, what had happened to her, whom she had loved, how that had destroyed her, the children she raised, the children she hurt, the ones, in turn, who hurt her.
I realized today that my grandmother was a wild-hearted woman.
Circumstance and tradition and the century she was born into held her locked into one place, one lifestyle, one marriage, but what I remember of my grandmother the most was the look on her face when the sky shone down on her skin and the wind whipped against her frame, and everything about her was wild.
Her heart would sing in those moments. She longed to run wild with the wind. She longed to pick up and go and never look back. I didn't see it then, but I saw it today in every memory of her face that I have gathered over the past 21 years.
When I would catch her staring out her kitchen window, lost in a world of thought millions of miles away, I saw it.
When her tone of voice would soften as she recounted the travels that accompanied her youth, always the stories were of her and my grandpa travelling together, but I saw how she wished she had adventured more, on her own.
When she would vigorously warn against falling in love, because men will break your heart ten ways to Sunday, and how she applauded women near and far for being their own captains.
Her favorite people were the wild ones, the looser ones, the unpredictable ones, the loud ones. She just wanted to run wild with them.
I believe that my grandmother loved her life, and her children, even though she was often poor at showing it. I do.
But I also don't really believe that my grandmother ever wanted to be a wife, or a mother, or a grandmother. I don't think she ever found a way to express that. I believe a lot of hurt was left in the wake of that failure of expression.
Oddly enough, as I sped through old country roads, windows down and music blaring, I felt it was the best way to honor her memory. I felt as though if she were in the car with me, she would throw her head back and laugh, and stick her small arm through the passenger's window, to feel the breeze, too. She'd say something unexpected about how much she liked that Taylor Swift woman, and she'd probably close her eyes and whisper, "Oh, let's just drive to the ocean."
I realized today that I'm a lot more like her than I ever realized, and as that realization came over me, so did a wave of tears that led to heavy sobs.
Today, a year to the week after her passing, I finally began to grieve for my grandmother, and for her wild heart.
"You can't make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
And if he wants to leave
Then let him leave
You are terrifying
And strange and beautiful
Something not everyone knows how to love."
Then let him leave
You are terrifying
And strange and beautiful
Something not everyone knows how to love."
-Warsan Shire, For Women Who Are Difficult to Love.
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