Grandma

Exploring a new voice in the piece...This will come after the musical piece. It follows the period right after the first time my mom came back.

Collectively my family caught our breaths when my mom came back the first time. It is like in any stressful situation, unbeknownst to you, the tension settles in your chest. You fail to breathe, and only do so after you regain your calm and find your footing. That’s what it was like now that she was back. We were all breathing again. We were all living again. What I failed to realize is that my mom came back, in part, because my dad’s mother was about to breathe her last. Like most children, I was oblivious to my surroundings. The only thing I had really been focusing on was my mother’s return, and now that she had finally came back, I was happy. I could focus on the trivialities of childhood again.

My dad’s mom was like most grandmothers. We would visit her every couple of months, and sometimes do holidays there with my dad’s brothers and sisters. She would have the dish filled with the usual assortment of candy that had been there since President Truman was in office. And like the buck that “stopped here,” the candy had too. It had remained a fixture in the room for decades. It was more a decorating strategy rather than anything you would actually eat. It helped bring the attention to other aspects of the room as you steadfastly avoided the dish. But, as you looked around her place, you couldn’t help notice a commonality which, I suspect, is customary in grandparent’s houses and apartments everywhere: it was…for lack of a better word, old. You knew an old person lived there.

At any rate, we had been visiting my Grandma more in the months prior to my mother’s return. I paid more attention to the Norwegian flatbread, known as lefse, that she made than I gave ever gave to her. If I had been looking, I would have noticed her features tightening, her rapid loss of weight, and the loss of the little color she had left in her fading auburn hair. Apparently, she had cancer. For how long? I couldn’t tell you. I still don’t know, to be honest. I just remember being being told, “she had lost her fight against cancer” when I was sitting in front aisle of church during her funeral service. I remember thinking, “huh,” in an offhanded sort of way. “So, that was it.” It was like getting an answer to a riddle you hadn’t really been thinking about at all. It’s not that I didn’t care about my Grandma. I did love her, but for whatever reason, I never bonded to her like I did to my mom’s parents. I honestly felt more concerned for my dad than I did for myself. Both of his parents were gone now.

But, as luck would have it, my mother was there for my dad during his grief. I remember walking in to their bedroom one night shortly after my Grandmother’s death. It was dark, and a sliver of light sliced through the room as I opened the bedroom door a crack. My dad was lying on his back, fully clothed, with his hands behind his head. His glasses made his eyes two reflected squares of light. My mom was next to him, with her hands wrapped and her chin, and her head on his chest. I couldn’t tell, but I think my dad was crying. They sat there in silence. Sometimes, that’s all you can do. Quietly shoulder someone else’s grief.

After we scattered my grandmother’s ashes on a blustery winter day in November, things started to get back to normal. My father was never one to talk about his feelings, so there were never any awkward conversations about how he was holding up. Soon, we brushed the ashes under the rug and moved on. We returned to our well-worn routines and habits. For me that meant school and playing in the piled high Minnesota snow. For my parents, marital bliss, which meant trust issues, aruging with each other, and my mother sleeping on the couch.

The first time I came downstairs and saw her curled up on the couch trying to squeeze underneath a blanket that was too small, I froze. I was under the assumption that things would go back to normal. Not the “tangential normal” from the previous summer where all my parents did was fight, but the “Normal normal” when my parents used to be happy. My mother’s return was supposed be a permanent thing, and the couch episode was the first sign that it wasn’t. She was supposed to be working on being a mother and a wife again, not exploring the responsibilities to see if she could be one when she grew up.