I got the call yesterday while I was chit chatting with other moms around a fire pit, our children running and playing around trees, roasting marshmallows, and sliding down creek beds.
I missed the call. I missed the text. And then I saw it, on the front of my phone, “Call me when you get a chance.” From my youngest sister.
My siblings and I are on a group text together, and we message every single day almost without exception.
We only call when it’s important.
Lisa called me. And then she texted me to call her back.
My first thought was maybe she’s pregnant. She just got married. They’re buying a house. Makes sense. I’m getting a personal “I’m pregnant” call.
Yay!
“What are you doing?” She asked when I called her back.
“Watching my kids play in the dirt. What’s up?” I responded.
“I have to tell you something.” She said.
“Okay.”
“Grandma died this morning.” She told me. Her voice cracked. My world cracked.
She went on to tell me the details, how she died in her bed, with my aunt, my grandmother’s only daughter and best friend, beside her. We talked about how sudden it was, how surprising, and yet how… almost natural. She was in her 80s, she had survived various forms of cancer over the last few decades, a couple of hip replacements, two ex husbands and a third husband, the love of her life.
How she was just so strong. So strong. We were sure she would live forever. We discussed how impossible it was to process. We, neither my baby sister nor I, had ever lost anyone close to us before. We have known people who have died, but this was different. Personal.
Death Is Indescribably Personal
I went on with my day after telling my sister I loved her and hanging up the phone. Went back to the moms, back to my kids, back to the fire pit and the creek bed. I put hotdogs on twigs for kids and popped open the bag of marshmallows.
My grandma is dead.
My grandma is dead.
It just kept ringing in the back of my head like a reminder that I most certainly did not need.
My grandma is dead.
And when we all piled into our cars after saying our goodbyes, and I drove me and the kids home, it finally hit me as the tears started rolling down my cheeks:
My grandma is dead.
Death is personal. Grief is heavy; we all know that. But death is personal. Not for the person who dies, but for the people left behind. The person who dies is gone, to who knows where, but no longer suffering, no longer invested in this specific human experience, off to the next adventure.
But I’m here. I’m still here. And this happened to me. It’s personal. It is, together with birth, perhaps the most personal experience a human being can ever have. The loss of someone who shaped you, who touched you, who loved you.
Fuck if it doesn’t feel so enormously selfish and yet so unstoppably self involved.
I can’t help it that I am crying, have been crying for the last 24 hours off and on between bouts of emotional paralysis and bouts of laughter at the good memories, over how sorry I feel for myself.
Yes, of course I also feel sorry for my father, my aunt, my sisters, my cousins, and everyone who loved this amazing woman.
But first I feel sorry for myself.
I lost the best person I have ever known in my 42 years on earth.
I have known a lot of good people, a lot of great women.
But my grandma was the best person I ever met and had the privilege of knowing, and the world lost her yesterday.
The Best Woman I Have Ever Known
My grandmother fell in love with a dockworker when she was 16 and quickly got pregnant with my dad. She was, at the time, in the 1950s, the beauty queen of her small city, Compton, California. She and my paternal grandfather got married and soon had another son, my uncle.
But, she was young and pretty and had eyes filled with stars. She quickly tired of her very nice husband and left him.
For the milkman.
Yep. My grandma married the milkman. That was probably the last wild and crazy thing she did in her whole life.
They went on to have a girl and then another boy, my aunt and uncle. The milkman, the man I always knew as my grandpa, raised my dad and his brother along with his own children, in a not so happy household.
My grandpa was a former US Marine and a hard ass. The bad boy my grandmother fell in love with turned into a bad father and husband. He was terribly abusive to my dad and his brother, not to mention my grandma.
But by now she had four children and found herself incapable of making the same rash decision to leave her husband that she had made the first time around.
Fast forward – my dad grew up and met my mom, they married, and had me a few years later.
I was the first grandchild my grandma had, the firstborn of her own firstborn, a copper headed fiery little girl she loved from the very first moment she saw me, so they say.
Unconditional Love
Once, a while back, my husband and I were talking about unconditional love, and my husband said, “I never had anyone love me like that growing up. I never felt safe, secure, and sure in someone else’s love. Not even my mother’s.”
“I did.” I said.
We are both children from extremely traumatic childhoods, and we were discussing similarities and differences.
In that moment, when I thought about the unconditional love in my childhood, I didn’t think first of my mother.
My mother loved me, sure. I never doubted that. But my relationship with my mom has always been complicated. She has struggled with her own shit for as long as I have known her, and whether it was divorcing my dad or marrying my abusive stepfather, or dealing with her own personal crises, we have had back and forths throughout my lifetime.
No. I didn’t think first of my mother.
I thought first of my grandmother.
She was always, always there.
Always.
She picked me up in her Trans Am after she got off work from her office job at Alpha Beta, smoking her long skinny cigarettes, and I would sit on the center console as she drove me a few streets over from my house to her house.
My grandma did everything like the picture perfect storybook grandma.
She didn’t just bathe me. She bought special bubbles for my bath and had little tea sets to play with while I bathed.
When I was very little she bathed me in the kitchen sink, and she made up funny voices for the little ceramic frog statues that sat above the sink in the kitchen window.
Fred and Freida, were the frogs’ names, and they would talk to me as I bathed, and in the end they would always smooch goodnight before going back home to their window seats after my bath.
Mrs. Butterworth also had a sweet happy voice as my grandma poured syrup on my pancakes on Saturday mornings after I had spent the night snuggled up in my very own special bed in my very own special room in her house.
“Well hello, Shanna!” Mrs. Butterworth would sing to me from her glass statuesque figure. “And how much syrup would you like this morning?”
My grandma brushed my hair as we sat and watched a movie together. She would run her hands up and down my back as I fell asleep. She was one of my best friends in the whole world.
With every other person in my life, I have had conflict, as is expected in relationships. You fight, you argue, you disagree.
But not with my grandma.
Perfect Connection
For 42 years, I knew her to be a woman who found infinite joy in life.
Not to say she didn’t have struggles or troubles. But she always found a way to laugh with life.
She finally left my grandpa when I was 10, shortly after which he died of liver failure from a lifetime of alcoholism. She made a life on her own, getting her own little apartment in a senior community. She dated one man who loved her so much, the poor thing, and my granny just did not feel the same, so she had to let him down gently.
I remember he showed up at her door with a love letter and flowers once when I was over visiting with my granny and my aunt. She stood in the door and turned him away, gracefully accepting the sad, droopy flowers and the letter full of misspelled words and bad grammar.
We laughed and laughed at the absurdity of this little man who would not take no for an answer no matter how often she turned him away. So in love with her he was, and so out of his league with my full of life and fire granny.
A deeply Christian woman, she fought tooth and nail with my aunt’s husband as he grew deeper into evangelism. He preached about a wrathful God, and my grandmother had no problem correcting what she perceived as his misconceptions about the Bible.
You see, she believed in a loving, nonjudgmental, always welcoming God. She sang gospel songs as she did the dishes, opening her heart and her vocal cords to the Jesus that could not give a fuck if you had sex outside of marriage or said fuck a lot. The Jesus she worked her whole life to emulate. The Jesus who encouraged us to love our neighbors and turn the other cheek, to not cast stones and to care for even the least among us as the best.
My grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had one of her breasts removed. My aunt and I took her shopping for new bras, and my granny whipped out her fake breast insert, passing it around to us and laughing that it felt like a chicken cutlet.
She continued dating and eventually found true love in her fifties, a nice little man named Jim, who simply adored her. I got to be at her wedding down in Southern California where she moved to be with him. Since I was 16, I have traveled the distance from Northern California south to visit her and my aunt, who left her own abusive husband and moved in next door to her mother and her new stepfather. Adjoining condos in Aliso Viejo.
Throughout the rest of her life, she was diagnosed with cancer again, she sat by her husband’s bedside as he died, she sat with my aunt when my cousin, my aunt’s son, committed suicide, along with several other tragedies, and she was the rock through it all.
When she had her hip replaced and was confined to a wheelchair, we simply wheeled her around Laguna Beach, running up and down sidewalk ramps, and my granny held on for dear life and giggled with delight.
The Three Musketeers
My grandmother and my Aunt Deena were always permanent fixtures in my life, more stable for me than anyone else, constant loving presences. They took me in when I ran away from home at 15, they offered me a place when they moved down south, they took all my calls for help, and always seemed to have the exact right words of wisdom through all my own self imposed struggles into adulthood.
We were the three musketeers. They would pick me up from my crazy household and offer some sense of normalcy.
My grandma, my aunt, and then my cousin who was born when I was 9, would shoot down the highway in the San Francisco Bay Area to wander the San Jose Flea Market on Sunday mornings. We’d pack up and hit Capitola beach almost every Saturday of the summer. We’d go over to the lagoon in Livermore and slide down waterslides.
My grandma rode roller coasters with me when no one else would. She made the best fried chicken I ever tasted. She enjoyed a nice cold Corona with lime. And she had a mad crush on Arnold Schwarzenegger, showing me the Terminator when I was 10 years old, just her and me, watching her hunk of burning love on the screen as we sat on the sofa in the front room of her house.
She just loved life, and she loved me, and then, she loved my kids.
She came to visit me many times after I had kids, and each of my children got to enjoy her in the short time they had with her.
Pickle Chips Grandma
Once, when she came to stay with us when Celaya was 4, I took them both shopping for snacks.
My grandma, a lifelong fan of dill pickles (a love she passed on to my father and then me), discovered a bag of dill pickle flavored potato chips at Whole Foods. I bought it for her.
The next day was Sunday, and we all got up, got dressed in our finest attire, and jumped on the BART train to go in to San Francisco.
For Gay Pride.
My grandmother smiled and laughed with crossdressers on BART, listening intently to one woman educating her on the legalization of marijuana. She ogled the very large man that walked past us on Market street with his very large penis hanging halfway down his leg. She danced with Celaya on the streets as the music played loud, and we giggled over our adventures afterward over lunch at Lemonade across from Yerba Buena Gardens before hitting BART to come back home.
Once we got home, I went about getting dinner ready and unpacking our day bags from the trip into the city.
When I walked back into the room where my grandma was staying, I found her and Celaya sitting together on her bed, munching on dill pickle chips straight out of the bag, like two little girls living their best lives.
Forever after that, my daughter referred to my grandmother as her pickle chip great granny.
So when she died yesterday, and I had to tell each person in my household, one by one, I wondered how Celaya would react.
I told Carlos first, breaking down entirely. I had to simply nod my head as he guessed at why I was so upset when he walked into our bedroom.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded my head no.
“What’s wrong?”
I nodded my head no.
“Did someone die?”
I nodded my head yes, bending at the waist now, head down.
“Who?”
“Who died, Shanna?”
“Your grandma?”
I nodded my head yes and cracked open, sobbing into his chest as he said “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry” over and over.
Then I had to relive it with my mother, my grandmother’s first daughter in law, one of my mother’s favorite people, and her picture perfect image of what a grandmother should be like.
“What’s wrong with you?” My mom said as she came into my room an hour after I told Carlos, and I was lying on my bed.
“She’s not feeling well.” Carlos said.
“Shanna, what’s wrong?”
“My grandma died!” I cried out and buried my head in my pillow, sobbing through it all over again.
So later, when Celaya came in and asked me what happened, I had by that time cried myself dry for the moment, and I was able to tell her my grandma died.
“Which grandma?” Celaya asked.
“Your great granny that used to come to stay with us. Joan. Grandpa’s mom.”
“Oh no!” Celaya said. “Pickle chips granny died? I’m so sad!”
Yes. Pickle chips granny died.
And I’m so sad, too.
I made fried chicken for dinner, and I thought of my grandma.
I made a margarita, and I thought of my grandma.
I drank an ice cold beer with lime, and I thought of my grandma.
I called my aunt, who was with my grandma when she died, and we cried together, and we laughed together, and we talked about how it was too damn soon for such a wonderful amazing brilliant soul, and how it also would just never not be too soon.
I remembered the last time she came to stay with me, and how after I had put my kids to bed I found my grandma on my couch sitting under a lamp, reading my copy of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and how we had this long conversation about feminism and powerful females and the wisdom that comes with getting older.
“I mean, hello? I’m old and I’m wise. I don’t know why no one listens to me.” She said, partially joking and partially serious.
I did, though. I listened to her. I found her mesmerizing, and I just don’t think I will ever meet another woman like her, another person like her, another person so devoted to love and life and laughter no matter what.
I’m sure I won’t.
But, I have come to realize in the last 24 hours, I can do my best to be like her.
Old Wise Woman
I can do my best to live to honor her words, her wisdom, her zest for life.
Once, when I was in college, my senior year, I was taking 7 classes to graduate on time, in three different languages.
I had 5 essays due in two languages and 2 language tests to take as part of my final exams, and I was so stressed out.
I happened to call my grandma from my car in the middle of it all. It was her birthday, and I mentioned in passing that I was so busy and I didn’t know how I would get it all done.
“Well, Shanna,” She said. “You will do one thing at a time. That’s what you’ll do.”
So simple. Yet so wise.
“You’ll do the first thing. Then you’ll do the next thing. And so on. You can only do one thing at a time. And eventually, you will get it all done.” She said in a simple, matter of fact, totally accepting and loving, reassuring voice.
And she was right.
And so, that is what I will do now.
That is how I will mourn her, heavy with the grief of her passing, heavy with the knowledge that I will never see her again, heavy with the weight of memories and loss.
I will do the next thing. I will fold a load of laundry, and I will cry. I will have a beer, and I will cry. I will do the dishes, and I will cry. I will take my kids on play dates, and I will cry.
And eventually my tears will turn to sweet memories and then to laughter at all the good times, all the beauty, all the wonder that has been the relationship between me and my grandma.
Death is personal and selfish and heavy and horrible and mysterious.
And I can only be grateful to have had this one perfect connection in my lifetime. One perfect connection that so few people get. One perfect connection that every single person should have. One perfect connection between two humans that maybe someday I can have again if I have my own grandchildren.
But all of that feels too heavy right now.
Right now, I can just do the next thing, in my grandmother’s name, the best woman I have ever known.
Just the next thing.