I’m grateful for these things that are but just a drop in the sea of the love I shared with my grandmother.
Two years ago yesterday, she left this world. Two days before her death, she briefly woke up. Most of her mind was gone at that point; when she tried to speak it came out garbled and panicked. But that morning she spoke clear as day.
“Hey baby,” she said with a smile, or as much of one as she could muster.
She was talking to my daughter, who had just turned one and was in my arms at the foot of the bed. Mema looked up at me, looked through me, and then she was asleep again. She never spoke another word. She never woke up again.
I’m grateful that we could give her that small moment and I’m grateful that she loved my daughter so much it allowed her a very brief reprieve from the hell the cancer wreaked on her brain and body.
I’m grateful for a couple months before that, when she could still speak but got confused very easily and was forgetting a lot.
I sat on her couch across from her in her chair, my mother between us. My mom tried to keep my grandmother’s brain occupied so she pointed at me and asked “who’s that? What’s her name?”
My grandma looked over me for what seemed like a year. Finally she replied “well, I don’t know, but I know she’s my granddaughter and I love her very much.”
Grateful for a month prior where I was once again on her couch. I spent as much time as I possibly could with her during her illness. She didn’t speak much to me anymore, or anyone really. I imagine she didn’t know what to say but I have no idea what it must have been like to have your brain being destroyed from the inside out.
That day, she looked over at me and her eyes were clear.
“Kirsten?”
I sat straight up. She hadn’t called me by my name in months and she certainly hadn’t sounded so much like herself as she did then.
“Yes ma’am?” I asked. She replied “are you okay, honey? You don’t look like you feel well.”
I didn’t feel well, and nobody else had noticed. She did. She always saw what I could easily hide from others.
I’m grateful for that fleeting moment of clarity so we could share a shred of normalcy for even a second.
For our sleepovers at her house after my grandfather died. They became a regular thing even once the grief of his death had become, well, not easier, but perhaps softened a bit, and we continued them until her diagnosis.
We’d sit in her living room eating homemade chili out of mason jars with long spoons, watching Judge Judy and questioning the reasoning skills of some of the guests. Or Jeopardy, where I’d shout mostly wrong answers to questions that she almost always got right.
Occasionally on these nights, we’d get on the subject of politics. We eventually came to an agreement that the only politics we would discuss would be why she and I would be the best choices to run the country. It never came to fruition only because we couldn’t seem to agree on who would be president.
That she loved me and supported me through my addiction without enabling me. One night I snuck a bottle of vodka in with me, and started drinking in my room at her house after she went to bed. The next morning, still drunk, I realized I’d hidden the alcohol and couldn’t find it.
Of course she was the one to make that discovery and she ordered me to come talk to her right then.
“I found this, I dumped it out, and it will not come into my house again. If you do, you will have to leave.”
She wasn’t at all angry with me, but she absolutely meant it. She hated anyone having alcohol in the house. My relatives had to keep their booze in the shop out back whenever they visited.
For that summer evening 13 years ago when we sat on her front porch swing, just barely pushing off the ground with our feet. She was on the phone so I snapped a photo of us. She was displeased, but I thought she always looked beautiful. After she hung up I turned to her and said I needed to ask her for something.
The something was approximately twelve grand so I could go to grad school two months later. My caveat was that she had to let me pay her back, because she was often so generous that people would take advantage, and I didn’t want to do that.
She said “oh sure, of course you can,” and two years later at my graduation she said “don’t worry about it,” and refused to take even a dime from me for the tuition. Without her I wouldn’t have an MBA.
I’m grateful to have gotten sober two years before she died. She wanted so badly for me to stop drinking and start building a life that made me happy. I got to spend her last two years with her sober, and although the last year was the most excruciating and heartbreaking, I was sober. I was present. I was there for her.
She was always there for me.
I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable 