Memoir Share #4: everyone ought to have a Grandma like mine. I knew before I picked up the phone that something had happened. “Your grandma just died,” my mother said. My mind registered these words while my heart stopped its beat for a second. “She’s dead. She’s 90. I too can die. I’m 18 and I haven’t done what I’ve come here for.” I stood in front of an abyss and everything I had prepared my young life for didn’t seem to matter. “I too can die right now as she had died just right now,” these words dawned on me like sunrise. It took me a while to realize that her death was my birth. I relayed the funeral arrangements over the phone to my mother just as Grandma had prepared me throughout the six years I took care of her. She wanted to be dressed in her torquoise blue dress with the sequins around her collar and to be buried back in New Jersey, across the country, to be laid alongside her husband who died 12 years previous. The last picture they had together was her wearing this blue dress. She had twenty more pounds on her frame then and her face rounder than the bony ridges of her cheekbones that now prominently hung the thin white skin along itself. My Grandma was born near one of the many lakes in Finland in 1896. Another century. Another time. Life was extremely hard as the photos of her parents’ faces illustrated. Their leather faces carved with determined wrinkles - determined to grab unto life. Staring at the picture, I imagined their hands penetrating iced lakes grabbing the fishes that would feed the family throughout the long winters and mosquito filled summers. These were people who knew how to survive and peered unapologetically to the world. When I first saw these pictures as a twelve year old, I wondered whether we were really related. My grandmother’s mother sat like a mountain while her husband’s bushy mustache did not conceal the darkness and bitterness of the harshness of his life. My grandmother married a Dane, a handsome young man whose picture showed him holding a sword he had used while he fought in WWI. They had separately immigrated to the US early in the century, via Ellis Island. They had worked in a mansion. He was the gardener and she was the cook. My grandmother mischievously narrated to me that they married secretly on a long weekend. Their employer did not allow their employees to have relations with each other and they kept their marriage a secret for a while. My grandmother was a gentle soul, and only had kind words to say about her husband. She was so generous that when a visitor would comment on how beautiful an object in the home was, she was known to give that object as a gift to the visitor on the spot. Elsie was her name and it is also my middle name. It means “My God is a vow”. I remember her with her red covered Finnish bible on her lap and she read it every day. She’d sit on the lounge chair on the driveway, the gray cat curled on her lap, her thick glasses with the curl on the top edges, contemplating what she’s just read. She was quiet and delicate. She was fiercely independent as well. By the time she was 84, I assisted her in getting in and out of the bathtub. We had this ritual that was to last six years. I washed her short white hair gently and scrubbed her thin back, along the curvature of her spine. She’d then washed herself alone. I’d wait outside by the couch until she called me to help her get up. I remember her sagging breasts that swam in her bra just as my own breasts were starting to grow and not yet accustomed to being bounded. I still feel the lack of elasticity of her skin as I oiled her legs and trimmed her toenails. Once she saw me giving a haircut to my Barbie doll and she asked that I give her one too. And I did, and my grandmother had a punk rocker hairstyle for the first time in her life. I learned to cook American food from my grandmother: beef stew, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, etc. In my home, we ate American and Filipino food together. Although she enjoyed all kinds of good food, I remember her eating a lot of applesauce and graham crackers, and how much delight she took in eating anchovies. She’d wait for me to come home from school and would prepare bowls of ice cream while we sat on the old couch. I’d curl next to her and she’d sing,”This little piggy went to market. This little piggy went home...” as she touched my toes one by one. I had a deep affection and love for my grandmother. I generously kissed her cheeks and embraced her. Every evening, I’d walk her to her bedroom and we’d lie side by side on the single bed while the dancing girl in the jewelry box danced to the tune of the entrancing song. She’d then tell me stories of her youth in Finland, in the East Coast, her marriage. I shared in her joy, and she cried tears of sadness when my own parents fought. “I never had fights like that with my husband,” she would tell me. I am glad she planted another alternative in my mind and heart. As the white flowers had fallen from the apricot tree that grazed her bedroom window, my grandmother’s health took a turn for the worse. She had to used a walker and did not walk past the mailbox. She loved collecting the mail, though as her friends died one by one, there were fewer and fewer handwritten letters. Then she couldn’t write anymore, and I wrote her letters for her. I wrote to relatives and friends I had never met and only knew through her stories. How different her life had changed. Here, she lived in the desert of sand while her letters arrived in the desert of snow up in Scandinavia.
Posted on: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 21:58:27 +0000