This is turning out to be a stretch of post-1oo posts that could be referred to as “the bummer” period. That’s how life goes.
I found out yesterday, by Googling, that my mom’s “mother”– the woman who adopted her, and for better or worse raised her and whose basement I lived in for a large part of my young life– passed away.
We weren’t close anymore, though at one point, when her husband (my “grandfather”) died I was the person who moved into her house to take care of her for several years, up until she no longer wanted me around because of the return of her son.
I’m not certain how to feel. I was terrified of telling mom. I found out while mom was in the waiting room at the hospital, so I kept it to myself all night and into today before sharing the information with her. She took it better than I thought she would. Or has so far. She has always had a way of staying strong for me.
I think I will miss grandma, from the good ways that I remember her. We had a major, major falling out over her treatment of my mother and her defending another member of the family who treated my mother worse still, but she did the best she could, I guess, living a life she made it pretty clear to everyone she never wanted to live. She was married to an alcoholic, a racist and often violently abusive man. She had one child with severe mental illness and drug issues and another child who basically handed responsibility for her kid over. Then there was my mother, and there was me, who she often made the brunt of her jokes and abusive nature but also supported in ways. She kept us fed, and she kept a roof over my head. I lived in her unfinished basement, and she rode me incessantly about my weight and often spoke in glowing terms of the father who was never there for me, but at the same time she did support me.
I feel like I gave back to her in all the ways I could. When the family wanted to put her in a nursing home I came back to live with her so she could stay in her house. I stayed for a few years, delaying going to college and working retail. For her. To give back.
I do wish I’d been able to say goodbye, but there’s this thing that happens sometimes with people. It’s another of those things I didn’t understand when I was younger, for I was idealistic and thought the best of everyone. Sometimes things are said and done that can’t be unsaid and undone. They can be forgiven, maybe, but they’re the sorts of things that you never get back to the other side of. They change things profoundly, and there is no real apologizing. That sort of thing happened.
For her sake, my mother had to sever her ties with her abusive adoptive family. This, of course, also meant that I needed to sever the same ties, though it wasn’t as hard on me, because at the end of the day I was more concerned with my mother’s safety than with ties to people who I never felt really wanted me around in the first place. Plus, there’s that thing that happened. That thing I’m not going to write about. This isn’t the place for such ugliness.
I do believe I’ll miss her. There weren’t that many people in my life that I could call family. She made it clear, more than once, that I wasn’t one of hers but I think she had sort of a Yondu with Star Lord thing going with me at times.
I knew she wasn’t happy. She was never, ever happy. I never saw her express joy in the way that almost everyone else does. She was a miserable person when she wasn’t putting on a public face. But she wasn’t terrible. She was just miserable. I’m not sure if that distinction makes sense in words. I know that she did things she wasn’t proud of. She told me a story once about how she watched someone die. I never figured out if it was real of if she was having a moment like that Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight.” She blamed herself for her husband’s death, as he had a stroke while she was in the basement doing laundry and she discovered him much later. She blamed herself for a lot of things.
She’d never eaten anything resembling Mexican food, but she had a friend who requested tacos once for a card party (she loved to play cards). I made them a modest TexMex spread. After that, I think I ended up making tacos once a week or so for two or three years. I taught her how to make pasta that wasn’t just boxed spaghetti with Ragu brand sauce.
I was the only person who would drive her all over town to use her coupons at different stores, even when I knew, by doing the math, that I was spending more in gas than we were saving with the multiple stores to save 5-7 cents.
She used to make coffee so strong it could remove paint from a mug. My colon shivers to remember it. She made the worst toast on the planet, too, but she could whip up a dreamy omelette if you could withstand the other two elements.
Long before Desperate Housewives, I got to sit at the table and listen to her dish the dirt on every other woman in the neighborhood. I knew all their dirty secrets, all their victories and defeats. I was the only 18-year-old dude I have ever known who could have blackmailed an entire neighborhood based entirely on knowing which grandmothers had grandkids who were sired by children they conceived with the neighbor or the milk man (yes, the milk man. There was a freaking milk man!). I knew the only gay person in the neighborhood because he and his lover had come out to grandma during a card game.
I sat and listened to her when she remembered the good things about her husband, and I was the one who told her it was okay when she wouldn’t go back to the bed where they slept together (she would sleep on the couch every night– eventually she told me to move into their old room so I could stop banging my head in the basement, because she couldn’t even bear to take laundry into the room to hang in the closets; it would end up being me who removed all of my grandfather’s things from the house and who sorted his affairs). I was the one who finally convinced her to move his easy chair out of the living room so she could sit in peace and not look at it with a sad, far away look.
I take back what I said before. I did see her legitimately smile, but only on one occasion. She never locked her doors, so family members would just walk in and out of the house. They often asked for money, and she almost always gave it to them. I am convinced she gave them money just so she could complain that no one paid her back.
On one such day, I came home from my job at the CD factory– a 12 hour shift– to see one of the cousins leaving, yelling as she went, something about not knowing why she was being given such a hard time. Grandma told me that said cousin had just asked for over a thousand dollars to catch up on bills and that she’d given it, but that she’d given a lecture, too. She told me about all the money that one person had asked for, then started in about many others. This was, I am convinced, her pleasure, odd as it was.
Then she got to me. She had, about two weeks previous to this day, loaned me the money to cover my bills as at the time I was working temp jobs and was in a dry period. As she started to mention it, I handed her an envelope of cash, repaying her in full. I’d also brought her everything I knew she’d need from the grocery from looking in the fridge before I left. I got up from the table to go cook– taco night.
I remember she smiled as she pulled the cash out of the envelope and stuck it with the enormous mound of cash she kept hidden in the tiny wooden box at the back of the cabinet behind the stove exhaust hood pipe. Her complaining about people borrowing money was always simply ornamental. She lived like she was poor (she grew up during the depression), but with her husband’s railroad pension and social security, she had more money than she could ever spend. Plus she bought next to nothing outside of food. I had to make her buy clothes from time-to-time. I convinced her to splurge on cable TV (for “me”– even though she was the one who watched TV all day; I was glad to be the excuse for her to see Maury, Dr. Phil and Oprah).
I was the only person she ever let see where she kept her stash of money hidden. I think that’s because she trusted me, unlike the others, not to steal from her. And I never did. I only ever took quarters to hustle people at the arcade from the jar of quarter rolls she told me to “not completely empty” since sometimes our flea marketing friend needed them to make change. Sometimes I even paid back into it. Not often, though, since she didn’t need the money. It all depended how well I did at the arcade or truck stop.
I learned so much from her. I’ll miss her, even if the person I missed wasn’t the person she was in her final years. I remember her like a weird Yoda-mixed-with-Dr. House figure, but I also know that she was kind of a bad person. It’s hard for me to reconcile that. How do you admit that you loved an awful person? How do you celebrate the memory of their good side without feeling weird? I’m not sure I can, but I can still be thankful for the contributions she made to my life. Good and bad, she was part of making me who I am. For all the bad things she might have done, it was partly her hand that kept my mother alive, that kept me safe from my father, etc.
Goodbye, Grandma. I’m sorry things went the way they did. I hope you’re at peace now, and I hope you understand. I know life was hard on you, but you always believed there was something better waiting. In that sense, I’m glad you finally got to go home.