When the Smoke Clears

I’m spending time with my grandmother tonight. Tomorrow I will be taking her to church. It’s such an odd feeling, being in this house which holds such a significant part of my childhood. Try as I might, it’s not all fond memories.

My grandmother is in her mid 80s. She has been coping with Parkinson’s for over 7 years now. I’m her only grandchild. I don’t talk with her enough but it is hard to do so, not because of the disease but because of all the harsh words from many years ago. I’ve come to accept them as just her way.

“I’m not good for anyone anymore. I don’t know why I’m still here,” she tells me. I know this is fatigue talking. Earlier in the evening she was full of life and was proud of the fact that of her siblings still alive, she is the oldest and yet looks the youngest.

Earlier she was sharing with me a Christmas card and letter from one of her former students. He was an anxious child, undisciplined in the days before we diagnosed ADD. He walked into my grandmother’s classroom 30 years ago. The letter credits her with the success he became in life because of how she applied discipline with a heavy dose of love and believed in him, in his ability. I walked her over to that letter as a reminder as to why she is still here.

She takes 8 prescribed pills per day. That’s it. Her house is still immaculate, even more remarkable since she let me know the fine younger black woman who used to come by to help her every week had to stop coming by about a year ago. She’s 84 and slowing down, according to my grandmother, who had to go back to doing for herself.

I am grateful for her church. My dad does not come by nearly as much as he used to. She is growing quite lonely, I am sure, but a few of the men in the church come by to check on her, ask her how she is doing. I am far from being one to do that.

For most of my life I was expected to reach out to her only to be told what I was doing was no good. She never came to visit me where I lived. She pretended things my father had done to me never happened. A few years ago after my big promotion, her holiday wish for me was “Well, I hope you can manage to hold on to this job.” (For the record, the one time I was fired was when I was 21 and I told my boss that I was quitting. She replied that I couldn’t quit on them, I was fired. “Sweet!” I replied. “Now you have to pay unemployment!”

Earlier tonight, though, I was asking and even taking notes on all she had to tell me. I was wanting to know more about living through World War II, the rationing, how it was in a coal miners’ town. She spoke of her second oldest brother and how he fought in France, but when he came back, he just wasn’t right anymore. He drank heavily. He would go into rages and fight his shadows, leaving holes in the walls. He died in his 40s.

It’s Christmas again, and my Christmas used to always be spent here, in this house, in this den. We would come here after a long day of work at the family store. I look over to where my grandfather’s chair used to be, looking for a magazine rack to the side that was overfull with atlases and road maps. I developed that passion from him early.

So many other things have not changed in these almost 20 years since I was last here during the holidays, from the gold edged mirror to the books on the shelves to the large credenza stereo high-fi turntable along the back wall of the den.

Earlier her sink was backed up. I went to the grocery store for some liquid drain cleaner. I ran into several people I had known for many years, one of whom lived next door to my grandparents and for years we would spend our summer days hanging out, playing Atari, running through woods and going through reams of graph paper designing starships. He was the master of the outer hull, I the specialist at drawing the schematics and floor plans based off his design.

Standing right in front of them, no one had any idea who I was, not even a flash of recognition. I graduated high school with 40 other people. Most classes had 20-25. We knew each other. But I am gone, a ghost, no longer even an image of what I once was. They remembered someone else and I am not that person. Almost all had my grandmother as their 3rd grade teacher and she is still easily recognized though her hair is now white and her spine has betrayed her into a shaky stoop.

I now understand one of the feelings going through me. While aspects of this place are still a part of me, I have long since ceased to be a part of it.

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