For as long as I can remember, you reminisced. About life during World War II, about seeing Sinatra with your friends at the Brooklyn Paramount, about your father, and how he kept you, your brother, and your sister fed, clothed and sheltered through the Depression, since he was a tailor, and rich people always needed suits. About tripe and sweetbreads and, the odd, old-world Italian food he would eat, and how you hated that he made you eat it too. But he was an immigrant, you said, and codes were strict. He was crazy for me, his first grandchild, but I couldn’t know how much because he died about a year after I was born.
At the dinette table after school, I’d devour a large slice of the box cake you would make every day and try to stitch together the swatches of your life you made real through the haze of a nostalgia that never lifted. Not even long enough to bring you into a new world, one where your daughter longed for a present-day embrace, a smile, a yelp of joy for an A+, a gentle wisdom to know that she was worthy of love, of self-regard.
You would show me photos, curled and stained, with you and your father on a bench in the city park where you would wheel me in a stroller years later; of your brother, leaning up against the front stoop, white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, smoking; of your younger sister on Easter in her funny straw hat with fuchsia flowers and a wide yellow bow. And when I was old enough, around 14, I knew that something was wrong, something was missing. The holes in your piecemeal tapestry grew larger, more obvious. Your memories held in a thick, immovable frame that I knew would slam shut if I ventured a question: What happened to your mother? Did she die when you were young? Why do you never speak of her?
My grandmother remained a mystery until I was well into my 20s. I was visiting Dad’s sister Dory. We sipped coffee around the table, her small kitchen filled with a late summer light that peered around frilly café curtains and floated over the knotty pine paneling that filled every bit of wall space, the color of a cardboard box.
Aunt Dory’s broad, freckled face was soft, rounded, as if every hurt that found its way to her had opened her heart to take in a little more. My questions somehow coiled their way into our conversation. She wasn’t sure exactly how your mother had died, but she knew my grandmother had been committed to a mental institution. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you knew.”
It was in early fall of that year when I let the secret out, to breathe in the open air. There’s no shame here, I told you. So little was known then, so little understood. Today, things would be different. She would get the help she needed.
You yelled at me, then cut me off. Your aunt should not have told you. It was all better left unsaid.
I blanched and fought back tears. How could you not see what your mother, fully formed and whole, would give us? I could learn about you, and about her, and join hands with my maternal line of women, complicated and damaged like me.
I could lay my head on your shoulder and slide down that slope of sadness and pain with you.
I could ask, ever so gently, if she was spending too much time crying or staring blankly out the window after the death of your twin sister from whooping cough at the age of three. And did she never return to your father, her other children? To anything? Was she simply unable to process such grief? And is that why he had her committed?
I could find out if my imaginings were real. If large men without expression came to the house with a straitjacket, like from one of those eerie 1950s melodramas where the woman screams as the medics descend, and she’s in the next scene, simple-minded as she comments on the flowers in the asylum garden, but doesn’t know who you are.
Did you ever visit her, I could ask. Did she know you? And what was the blow that did the most damage? Her sinking into a place of loss so deep and raw that she could no longer love you? Or was it the actual removal from your house, your life? So stark and brutal that you never recovered? Did this make it hard for you to show love? Did you join your mother in grief when she was ripped from you?
And have you been in mourning ever since?
Years later, it’s my turn for the weekend visit. I drive down the parkway, a box of something sweet on the passenger seat, my fantasy unfolding yet again as I pass the rest stops and refineries, through the lonely New Jersey Pine Barrens. I’ll make tea. We’ll sit together on the sofa, in your living room, with the weak sunlight struggling to push through the dirty, rain spotted windows. I’ll stare at the stained beige carpet, dad’s armchair, the cushion the shape of his withering body, and where he slept and ate and breathed until he died. And we’ll hold hands in quiet.
Then slowly, softly you’ll tell me about her and about your life with her, and without her. How she was perfectly fine until bad things started to happen, and she sank into a depression that broke her. We’ll agree that you bore witness to a time of paralyzing stigma and perverse treatments that destroyed neurons and souls, and the belief that doctors could always be counted on to help you. That had it been a different time she would have gotten therapy, prescriptions. I’ll tell you about all of that; counseling, breathwork, Xanax, a trial run with Prozac, which didn’t work for me. You’ve always rolled your eyes at the list of things I’ve done to keep at bay the unease I feel, always, that I could so easily slide into a miasma of depression, anxiety, and anger from which I too would never emerge. But this time, you won’t. You might even ask me why I didn’t push you to try some of these things yourself.
You’ll cry, and I’ll hold you close, and you’ll hold me.
But of course, it doesn’t go that way. Yes, I make my way through parkway traffic. I bring the cookies. I boil water for tea. I keep quiet as your meanderings slither into familiar terrain. Your ailments, other people’s ailments, or how you never liked this person or that person or the other person. And how you want to die, but your body holds on, and how you miss the man you complained about every day of your married life.
I interrupt. I’ve signed up for one of those DNA testing services and I’m climbing our family tree. I can’t find much about grandma, I say. It would help a lot if you gave me some hints. For the algorithm.
Your face hardens and your eyes cloud with a chilly haze, drifting over my head and towards the window that looks out on dad’s shriveled tomato patch. I watch your lip tremble in indignant woundedness. I clean the crumbs off the table, pat your shoulder, tell you to take care, and leave. I make the drive home, soothed only by the myth that we are so vastly different. I promise myself I will never ask again.
And now I can’t. Because you’re gone.
You went as you wanted about three months later– suddenly, painlessly. I am surprised to be grieving. Not the loss of my mother. Not even that I will likely never learn the secrets of my grandmother. I mourn, instead, the grey cavern of emptiness, and its echo of silence that reminds me every day that you could take no comfort in our tea and cookie visits, my yearning to be closer, that you could find no joy in your children and their promise to never turn their backs. Nothing could ever fill that void of mother love for you. And in that, we are connected.
Image by Miray Bostanci on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Relationship, Redacted - September 24, 2024
This is a truly beautifully written, heart-breaking, honest essay. Just stunning.