In Honor Of Grandparents

I added a Sara Lee pound cake to our Amazon Fresh order this week. The craving I had was less for cake and more for a connection to my grandma. 

The versions of her I got to know have been on my mind a lot these last few weeks. The matriarch who believed she knew better. The octogenarian who struggled with her identity shifting. Once a woman who at 82 cooked three meals a day for every member of her family in the blink of an eye she became an 84-year-old who needed help to use a commode. 

I see her in me. I pinpoint my predilection for the dramatic, for the funny, for the saucy to her quick wit and sharp tongue. I chart back my own co-dependent tendencies, the ones I work through in therapy, to her. Our hands and paths intertwined often, old veins and younger skin. I believe in the mystical and so by often I mean now and still. 

On the weekend I turned 28 years old, I found myself on a camp ground where each of the cabins were named after staff members’ grandparents. I was reading Jenna Bush Hager’s EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IN ITS TIME, an ode to grandparents, her own but also to the connection we all have to these beings who manage to evoke history, permanence, continuity, and the future, all at once.

My grandmother was my oracle. She believed in my present, but also spoke to me about my future. It’s just come back to me that she often spoke of my 28th birthday. She’d say, 

“You know, I didn’t get married until I was 28 years old, so you shouldn’t think of it until at least then.” 

So, maybe at the heels of 28 this is why she’s felt heavy on my heart these last few weeks. 

I didn’t appreciate my grandmother to her full extent when she was alive. We had a relationship that was complicated by grief and loss — her of her daughter, me of my mother. The ease and love that floated between her and some of my younger cousins was absent when I was a teenager who felt resentful that my new legal guardian and second mom was a 70-something year old woman. It took me parenting her as her caregiver to see beyond the harsh angles. In those few months, in between ICU visits, I saw her softness, the ones my older cousins referenced often. 

In the colder months of winter that year, I felt her warmth in ways I had never before. She would lean her head on my shoulder and laugh with me about the smallest of things. Like, once after harder seizures and the pieces of her mental capacity they took from her, she laughed with me about the oatmeal I made her. She laughed when I tried to coax her to eat with spoon that flew like a plane. She laughed and then I laughed because for as hard as those moments were, we were together and the moment was ours. 

So now, 7 years after her death, I search for her in pound cake. I find her in books about grandparents where others reflect on the nuances of their own relationships and the singular lives all our grandparents live. I think of who she imagined I would be in this year of my life and know that she would be proud no matter how I live the next 365 days. 

Losing a grandparent shifts our connection to mortality. Bush Hager’s book reminded me of this. Just how often you think, “well, we’re the next in line to go.” One less generation between us and what we believe mortality to be. 

This week I listened to “Marjorie” by Taylor Swift and it surfaced how I feel when I listen to “Stop This Train” by John Mayer. There’s an ache in us to stop the pace of life so we can notice it more. We want to jot down the phrases, find the old love letters, ask questions about the meaning of life to those we believe hold the answers. 

I didn’t find a way to stop my grandmother’s life from ending when she was already on her path. For a long time, I’ve struggled with the guilt that comes from making end of life decisions and wondering if I had power I did not yield. 

On the snow covered path the snaked through cabins named after grandparents, I thought about whether I’ve wanted for the wrong things. Stopping or pausing wouldn’t have transformed our relationship or given us more than what the current moments had already afforded us. Maybe, what I look for in the pound cake is my version of a grandparent-named cabin — a sweet way to fold who we know into our right now.