It was a call I had dreaded my entire life. With effort I could push the lingering fear out of my thoughts, a Zen-like meditation exercise to return me to tranquility, contemplating the vastness of the billions of seconds that would transpire before I would ultimately hear the ringing of that fateful bell. But thinking that I would ever be free from the gnawing thoughts was pure naiveté.
Several nights I was awakened by a vibration on my mattress, a 3 AM phone call with the caller ID reading: “Mom”. Every tiny capillary in my legs would infuse with mercury, a creeping sensation both liquid yet metallically heavy. For a split second, I would have the same thought: was this just an accidental butt dial or would the soundtrack of the coming life-altering news really be this frivolously stupid iPhone ringtone?
Summoning the nerve to answer, it had always been the former. Nothing more than a heavy release of breath after hearing “Sorry, sweetheart. Go back to sleep.”
All those years, I had imagined it would be different. I expected some sort of dramatic episode, surely influenced by TV and the movies. In the midst of a scene of regular life, maybe I had just returned from the grocery store and was unloading, I would hear the doorbell ring, and nonchalantly stroll over to answer it, chased by the sounds of suspenseful string instruments. There I would be met by two policemen, with worried looks on their face and holding their hats in their hands. Deducing immediately that something was wrong, the world would go into slow-mo, my head falling as I fainted, knees buckling in grief.
But no, it never happens that way. And it didn’t. No ominous string music. Instead my ears filled with blaring sports commentators and laughter over hot sake and deep fried sushi rolls. And since this is the new millennium, no doorbell, just a quaint push notification from Facebook Messenger, immediately ending the joyousness of raw fish washed down with rice wine. Two words: “Grandma died :(“
That last emoji was a paradox. For someone whose youth was over solidly before the whole social media/texting craze, I’ve always felt that that peculiar code of symbols used to imitate facial expressions completely trivializes any communication. If it were so important to understand the facial image of someone attempting to express themselves textually, our forebears would have devised it millennia ago — we would have found papyruses with hieroglyphics reading “I, Khufu, son of Sneferu, ruler of Egypt and builder of the Great Pyramid, have destroyed the Nubians in battle…fawk yea! w00t :p…”
But a fresh example is always enlightening. This time that little frowny face felt different. Without it, the sentence would feel matter-of-fact, devoid of emotion, a newscaster reporting on the significant events of the day. Ho-hum, one of the hundreds of candles in the cathedral went out today…had anyone noticed or could they even point out which one it was?
As the days passed, I took everything one step at a time, my feet dumbly following each other like a pack train of mules. They did not care where they were going, they just walked, until they were strapped in under a non-reclining seat, hovering in place 6 miles above an icy ocean for 11 hours to get back to my family’s village of origin. As I replayed the recent events in my head, everything just kept sounding like that news report: “Old woman in the middle-of-nowhere, not known by many people, passed away yesterday. Life goes on.”
Hay is for horses. Or mules.
My brain wanted to scream an addition: “Not known to many, but SPECIAL to those that did!” Yet my body didn’t follow that cue.
To be honest, it felt like crap. This woman who had held me in her arms, bent over backwards to feed me, to take care of me, to transmit her history, was no more. This woman who had masterfully woven together decisions and premonitions over 70 years ago, navigating a brutal war zone and oppressive regimes, each day threatening a misstep and subsequent butterfly effect resulting in me not ever existing, yet despite the odds she had survived, survived to give life which would in turn conceive me half a century later. All that she had done for me, and now she was gone, with me struggling to shed a single tear.
I’d meditate on her state while alone, just trying to psyche myself into the sadness that I knew I felt. I’d contemplate how she would feel now if I touched her hand: cold and clammy. Not the way grandmas are supposed to feel. I’d ponder her last moments, wondering if she was scared or confused or insecure or unfulfilled. Not the emotions that grandmas are supposed to have. I would get just to the brink, and then suddenly lose the almost-sadness, returning to the default state, the paradox of physical denial and mental acceptance balancing out to a net zero: inside, I was a blank page with faint traces of pencil marks, millions of words which had been written, and long erased by the author for not expressing anything right.
“Poor, poor grandma” I would say. And then I’d take a sip of my coffee. Not in a dick way… just in a sort of, there’s a coffee in front of me, and I want some coffee way. And then I’d keep breathing.
What was wrong with me?
I get it now. Beating myself up, the guilt, the remorse…they were total bullshit. After all the sadness she had survived, would my grandma really want me trying to force myself to be sad? As she sat in prison half a century ago for 8 months on fake charges, was she sitting there making herself cry? Or was she planning her life whenever they let her out of that God awful place, dreaming of the future as an escape from the present? Did she disparage herself for what she felt? No. My grandma never criticized herself for her emotions, or lack thereof. She didn’t have time for that shit.
In that spirit, let me tell a story about her. A happy one to show what kind of grandma she really was, celebrating her and not moping around, feeling sad about not feeling so sad.
This story requires me to begin by explaining her profession. For decades she worked as a nurse in a hospital that specialized in treating tuberculosis, which ostensibly made her a medical professional…except that she received her training in a Communist country during the 1950s. Suffice it to say her know-how was chock full of superstition, and like a slab of rotting meat in medieval France, though her understanding of medicine was heavily peppered with science, it still barely concealed the festering substratum of folk beliefs and old wives’ tales. Worst of all, any challenge to a practice that was clearly wrong would be met with swift rebuke: “I’m a nurse. Are you?”
Styrofoam. Eastern Europe’s #1 new insulation technology.
This meant ice cream on a hot day or a cracked window on a road trip meant you were a candidate for instant TB, germ theory be damned. Thank God I wasn’t a girl, or she would sharply disallow me from sitting on cold concrete, for fear of causing infertility by “chilling my ovaries”. So when I would visit, bringing my more Western sensibilities, we would often clash as certain habits would become a point of contention, for example the the habit of not wanting to wear 4 layers and a sheepskin coat indoors when it was 93 degrees Fahrenheit outside in the summer.
One afternoon, I was lounging in the guest room. With bare feet. GASP! The horror! These dainty, exposed tootsies quickly fell under the eagle eye of my grandma. She came in right away and said, “My darling, could you do me a huuuuge favor? Could you put on socks? This isn’t America, you know, and you could catch a cold. How am I going to send you back to your mother with a grave illness?” I was 26 years old at the time. I don’t even think my mom knew I was out of the country. But anything for grandma. I put on the damn socks.
About 5 minutes later, a distinct shuffling sound portended the creeping return of my grandmother. Another request: “My darling, I’m so sorry, but you really are going to come down with something. Please put on a jacket.” I complied, but now I looked like a complete idiot, wearing an outdoor coat over pajamas, heavy wool socks topping off the ensemble. One glance through the window, and I saw two portly older women taking refuge in the shade, fanning themselves with newspapers to cool the beads of sweat pooling on their substantially thick eyebrows. Yea, it was beach weather, fall-asleep-in-the-sun-after-an-ice-cold-beer weather, and here I looked prepared to make a snowman…indoors!
Unable to regulate my temperature, the ends of my bangs were starting to stick to my forehead. I was sweating, but trying to take deep breaths and get back to normal. The entire apartment was silent, but for the ticking of a clock somewhere. And then I heard it: *skiff*…*skiff*…*skiff*. Footsteps. As they got closer, I felt like the protagonist of The Telltale Heart, tormented by a repetitive sound that only grew louder and louder, pounding in my head, the harbinger of impending doom.
What could she tell me now?! Every inch of flesh is covered! If I put on one more article of clothing, I would evaporate into nothingness, fizzling out as solid matter converted to nothing more than water vapor that would blow away in the slightest breeze. *skiff* *skiff* *skiff* I could hear every atom of the soft rubber slipper sole grating against the smooth ceramic of the floor tiles. Here she came. In the way that you sense an object when feeling your way through a dark room, knowing from some incomprehensible sixth sense that there is a massive armoire you are about to run into, I sensed her presence in the threshold as I kept my eyes closed, hoping lack of eye contact would make her go away.
“My darling…” she squeaked, with a hint of embarrassment. Damn, apparently this T. Rex did see me even if I hadn’t moved. “Yes, grandma?” I choked out. She fidgeted with her words, hanging her head with her gaze often turning away. Something was wrong here…this request was not like the last two, which had been delivered with confidence. “Um, sorry to bring this up, but, um…darling…have you, um…have you relieved yourself today?”
My chest tightened with utter humiliation, like a teenager whose mom just walked into the prom and pinched his cheeks. “GRANDMA!”, a word which I didn’t quite say but more so breathlessly exhaled. “Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t see you go to the bathroom today, and I just wanted you to know that I have medicine that can help if you are not regular.” I just stared into space, trying to accept that my grandma had asked a man pushing 30 if he had already pooped today or not. All I could manage to say was, “I’m fine!” eyes wide open like a brainwashed cult member, just peering at my wool-swaddled feet. Yea, that just happened.
I reminisced about this event on a beautiful, sunny day in a snowy cemetery, dusted like a fancy pastry and tucked in the hillside of a wooded mountain in Romania. The day was warm enough that the snow on the gravestones was forming its own puddles, the air still but for the ringing of an ancient bell. Surrounded by people clad in long sheepskin overcoats, I watched as two village locals, by their ages surely a master and apprentice, clumsily moved a massive stone slab to close the ridiculously gigantic sarcophagus that would house the miniscule jar in which my grandma would spend eternity.
I was seized by an urge to jump up and check on her jar, to be extremely pedantic about how it was placed and which way it faced. Anything for this woman, my ancestor, my progenitor, the woman who had cared so much about me that she had kept a mental record of my daily bowel movements to make sure I was OK. At the very least, I could make sure that her flower wreaths were perfectly placed outside of her tomb. It took me several minutes of adjusting until they were laid at the proper angle to make the outer presentation absolutely perfect. Anything for her.
I walked backwards a few steps to admire what I had done. Yup. Perfect. I wheeled to follow the narrow path out of the cemetery, making sure to walk slow and spread my weight out as to not slip in my wingtips, which were definitely not meant for iced over stone and concrete.
Right then, I felt the distance. I was going, and grandma was staying. The bells kept ringing rhythmically as I took slow steps, the visual image of the church in the distance blurring in my eyes as warm, salty water started welling up, effectively ending the long-standing emotional drought.
R.I.P. Bunica
–Mircea “Che”, 29, (Atlanta, GA), laying not very well-known but important people to rest in Romania