Cockroaches

With my family gathered around, my mother turned to my sister two days before she would walk down the aisle and reminded her, “Amy, you and Bryan are incredibly lucky. You will have three grandparents in attendance at your wedding. Think about that. I will never get to be at a grandchild’s wedding. I did the math and it is what it is. It isn’t terrible or tragic. It is just how the timing worked out. I just wanted you to appreciate how special this weekend is… for all of us.”

Recently, my friend’s 95 year-old grandma passed in her sleep. I spent the following night, puddling tears into my glasses, quaking and trembling. My teeth chattered. I burrowed into a nest of crumbled and shredded Kleenex. I wasn’t crying entirely for Grandma G, although she was a wonderful lady and the family gatherings just wouldn’t seem whole without her – poised next to her walker with rouge on her cheeks, cradling a Manhattan on ice. But her passing radiated shockwaves of fear inside me. My own Baba will turn 85 this month. And I kept seeing an image of an hourglass in front of me; sand draining the upper basin in a curtain of sediment.

The idea was – Feel it Now. Maybe if I envisioned the end, soaked up the grief like sponging mussel juice with bread, I could spare myself some portion of the devastation later simply by anticipating. Of course, it was foolish. But, I felt charged to make some changes. The day after the wake, I called in sick and spent the afternoon with Baba, assembling salami sandwiches and sipping black tea, pouring over pictures I had taken of Brad and I a few weeks back.

Looking around her home, I realized it would be the remnants that would singe me. The movies left in the Netflix cue. Clumping flour that wasn’t dumped into a mixing bowl and kneaded into kolachies. The ham bone in the freezer developing an icy fuzz. A half bottle of perfume. Fine white hair in her comb. A calendar left, bleeding open to the month of April…August… or November. Her homemade pickle jars in the cellar, dated with masking tape. The sweet smell of her robe. The mail – Aldi ads, voter fliers, AT&T bills – collecting on the table- her name still bringing printed on envelopes. Marie Novak. Hyacinths, the following spring – little stalks of color poking out of the dirt, having survived another harsh Chicago hibernation.

All the beautiful, simple things would morph into cockroaches.

My friend told me she was washing dishes a few weeks after her grandmother’s passing when she spotted a vase perched on the windowsill that had been passed down through the generations. One of the items she had gotten in the distribution of “stuff”. It had been her great-grandmother’s and it stood boldly, almost tauntingly, in her kitchen as her five year-old practiced writing her name on construction paper with stubby Crayolas. This stubborn, ugly old vase. She felt like grabbing it by the neck and shattering it- taking pleasure in its demise – shards of glass, glistening like wet diamonds in her sink basin. It was only an object and yet…it had survived.

When I asked Sarah how her daughter had taken the news she told me that she had wondered if Grandma G was in heaven. When she nodded, her daughter replied, “But Mom, who will pick up her mail now?”

And that is the crux of it. That it falls on the survivors to trudge through the swampy bog of leftovers – items that may appear harmless to an outsider, but bite, burn and bruise those who have loved. They are our pacifiers and our poisons. We know they are the only tangibles left – a finite number of them - and we cling. We cling to them like driftwood because we are afraid to assess the intangibles, take stock and recognize how we could possibly have enough memories to sustain us. How could there ever be enough?

When my family traveled to Florida last week for Amy’s wedding, we were returning to a place that was warm for us. Warm and woven into our childhood memories of vacations, beach, family and sand. It is where my paternal grandmother’s ashes were tossed from the Grand Marco Bridge to settle in the sun-dipped sea, dance with the coral, and lap with the tides. It was where we had fished for minnows as sun-burnt kids, learned to swim without water wings, and hunted for lizards at sunset. It had been our spring playground.

Throughout the wedding weekend, I did think of that hourglass. It could very well have been Baba’s last plane trip. I noted the pitch of her laugh at dinner while chatting with Bryan’s relatives. I watched her gently pat Brad’s hand and defiantly complain about the wheelchair. I stole a glance at her face when Amy walked down the aisle.

The raw truth is, it will still hurt later. That is for certain. I suppose all I can do is soak up the mussel juice. That is all anyone can do. So that later, we may have the strength to sort through the mail.