My Grandma

I feel like writing an introduction to this post, because it's different from my usual day-to-day stuff. But I won't.


My grandma was an enormously fat Bohemian woman with short, gray hair curled up all over her head, small, blue eyes and wrinkles all over her face. She had reading glasses that she hung from a chain around her neck like a piece of jewelry. Her glasses sloped up at the edges and came to a sharp point—perfect granny glasses—and every time I saw her, she wore the same flowery, formless sack of a house dress.

Grandma’s age and weight worked together to create the most amazing upper arms I ever saw. Her skin draped over the muscle and bone of her arm and hung down at least 4 inches below like a sheet. The first thing I did when we came to visit her was to sit on her lap and lift up the sleeve of her house dress so I could push and knead the soft flesh of her arm, then swing it and swat it and watch it sway back and forth. She laughed and indulged me because I was only a small child—just three or four—and I didn’t know yet that you shouldn’t call attention to someone else’s flaws so exuberantly. But to me, her arms were superhuman. All of that prodding must have hurt after awhile, because soon enough she would gently push me off of her.

Once I was off her lap, I would beg her to show me her teeth and she would push her dentures out of her mouth with her tongue just for a second and suck them back in before I could examine and analyze what was happening. I’d plead for her to do it over and over as I stood in rapt attention in front of her with my own tongue poised on the roof of my mouth, waiting for the magical moment when her teeth would fly out of her mouth and back in. I was thrilled and deeply disturbed by it and no one would explain to my satisfaction how she did it. After indulging my fascination with her body, Grandma would tell me that she had to make dinner or chat with my parents or give one of my brothers or sister a chance to say hi. She would push me along to go play and I would stagger away, off-kilter, like I had been on a theme park ride.

When I knew her, Grandma was a widow. She lived by herself in a bungalow in Cicero in the house my dad grew up in. We visited multiple times a year, my dad driving an hour or more with four kids and his second wife from the north suburbs where we lived to the southwest side. I remember little of what we did when we visited, other than exploring the house or running in circles around the large, unfinished basement. I remember the bungalow clearly—a long, narrow, single-story house with bedrooms along the left side of the house and a kitchen in the back. I remember almond-flavored cookies in the shape of a moon that were sprinkled heavily with powdered sugar. I remember a bathroom that smelled strongly of Dove soap and a kitchen that smelled strongly of beef stock and a gas stove.

My memories of Grandma can only be images and snippets, because she died of cancer when I was five and she was 75. No one knew where the cancer started, but my dad told me that she didn’t notice anything was wrong until it spread to her lungs. Even then she didn’t think she had a problem—just a little shortness of breath that she could compensate for by breathing harder and faster and more continuously. As long as she kept breathing, she felt fine. But it was an unwinnable race and by the time breathing took precedence over talking, she had only a few weeks left to live.

My dad got her a bed in the hospital where he was on staff. Children weren’t allowed on her floor, so Dad decided to use his pass card and sneak the four of us up the back stairwell to see her one last time. We had to be quiet and not talk or yell or push each other as we trudged up many flights through the dark, enclosed stairwell to Grandma’s room. By the time we filed in and Dad placed us in a huddle at her bedside, we were all exhausted and out of breath. We filled the room with the sound of our inhales and exhales, the loud whooshes of air getting softer and less labored until we had all recovered except Grandma, who sat up in her bed, unable to talk, just smiling and waving and stroking each of us on the head and cheeks while she breathed and breathed and breathed.

She must have died just days later. It was nighttime and I was sitting on the floor of the kitchen in my pajamas, propping my animals next to each other in a perfectly formed line from tallest to smallest. My mom sat at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and waiting for my dad to come home. Our kitchen was long and narrow and I was far from the door that led to the outside of the house. When my dad walked in through that door and turned into the kitchen, he faced my mom.

“Well, she’s dead,” he said.

My mom responded to the announcement with a loud “Oh!” I wasn’t sure if they knew I was sitting there. I put my head down on my chest and concentrated on my animals while my parents talked about funerals and Bohemian National Cemetery and calling Aunt Alice, Grandma’s sister. I had a sudden and uncontrollable urge to laugh. I knew it was an inappropriate reaction and I felt sorry that I wanted to do it and worried that I was going to, so I curled myself tightly around my animals and stared into their inanimate eyes and stroked their faux fur. I hoped that my parents wouldn’t notice me.

In the few days after my grandma died, I asked my parents over and over about death and how long I was going to live and how long they were going to live. I asked question after unanswerable question.

“It’s too far away to worry about,” my dad told me. “You are not going to die tomorrow. You are going to live a long life and you won’t die until you are an old woman so far from now that you can’t even imagine it.” I made him paint the picture of forever for me. How long until I’m 75? Is 70 years practically forever? Could I live to be 100? Is that the same as forever? Is it longer than I can imagine? Are you sure I can’t imagine it? Are you sure?

The last time I saw my grandma, she was lying in her casket at the wake. We all stood in a line, walking past her body and lingering in front of it for just a second or two. My dad had explained the process of embalming to me, so I knew that even though she looked like she was sleeping, she was dead and her eyes were sewn shut and her mouth was glued tight and her body was filled with formaldehyde instead of blood. I wanted to touch the skin on her face to see if it felt different. I wondered what it would be like to climb into the casket with her. I wanted to stand and stare at her for a long time, examining every feature of her face. But there were people behind me in line and my parents were watching me closely, so I shuffled my feet as slowly as I could and kept moving. I knew it was the last time I was going to see her. I knew they would not allow me to go back to the end of the line and walk past her casket again and then back and past it again.