A kind of grandmother

My grandmother wasn’t the huggy sort. She taught me a lot, for sure—carving one’s own space out of the demands of a young family, for example, and hopping on a plane to, oh, Moscow or Hong Kong or Barcelona as the mood strikes. She encouraged me to go to college (no one else in my family did), to skip motherhood, to write, to work. But sit on the floor in a pile of toys? Brush my hair? Read me bedtime stories?

Uh, no.

Now, in part, this would have been pretty much impossible, as my grandparents lived in Los Angeles, while I grew up in Texas and Florida. Those many miles didn’t offer up a lot of opportunities for Play-Dough and sugar cookies.

But even so, when they came for visits, my grandmother always seemed so tall. I mean tall, as in, no crouching down for eye-level conversations or sloppy kisses.  Emotionally tall.

I remember a visit to a park when I was about five. She and my grandfather took my brother and me to feed the ducks. We stopped at a grocery store on the way so my grandfather could buy a loaf of bread, and my grandmother stayed in the car with me, reapplying her lipstick and adjusting her scarf. Then, we were off. Yellowed pictures tell the story, she in her snazzy red pantsuit, hands tucked into her pockets or swinging at her sides. Those hands were not feeding the ducks, nor were they holding mine.

My brother and I had no clue what to do. We’d never been to a park to feed ducks. My parents wouldn’t have dreamed of throwing away perfectly good (or even slightly bad) bread. We looked uncertainly at them. My grandmother said, “Throw the bread at the ducks, for heaven’s sake.” So we did.

In those photos, we all look so serious, so earnest. We all did out best.

So when, eventually, many many lifetimes later, I was a teacher reading through my students’ journals, I was surprised at the depth of feeling many of them expressed at the loss of their grandmother. They weren’t just sad. They were devastated. They described enormous raw places in their chests, months and months of grief, years of lingering sadness.

I was like, “Huh?” Now, hear me out. I’ll be sad when my grandmother dies. But I couldn’t relate to the enormity of my students’ pain. I even wondered if a bit of hyberbole was at work, you know? The typical drama-llama stuff of high-schoolers. I tried to be sympathetic when a kid missed a week or two for the death of a grandparent, but, really, I didn’t get it.

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I just spent the last four days with Kennedy and Brooklyn, our granddaughters. In actuality, they are my late husband’s daughter’s girls, born years after his death and my own remarriage, but I call them my granddaughters. They are my precious girls in every way.

We lived out of state for half of Kennedy’s nearly four-year old life, but we jumped on planes with regularity and Skyped often. Now the little ones are only a two-hour drive away. I try my darndest to see them once a month, pulling one or the other out of school for the day so we can, yes, feed ducks, color, watch movies, go to the zoo, read bedtime stories, take baths, play make-believe with baby dolls, and brush each other’s hair.

And this has all paid off. When my girls see me, they shriek.

It’s not all perfect. I have just enough of my grandmother in me to get pretty bored with swing sets and princesses, and my tolerance for whining is zero.

But still. It’s kinda great.

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On this most recent visit, I remembered the journal entries of my students. Of their grief when their grandmother died. And I felt awful, some because I’d not fully understood or appreciated the depth of their pain, but mostly because of this: Kennedy and Brooklyn will suffer a loss when I die.

I had just dropped them off at school when this realization hit me. And it hit hard.

I love these little girls. I want to be in their lives. I want to be one of the hands they hold, one of the necks they nuzzle, one of the voices whispering to them how very much they are loved.

But am I just setting them up for inevitable pain and loss?

This is the way of love, I suppose. But does it have to be? Is this just another stupid human trick we do, chasing love when we know loss is its conjoined twin?

Jane Hirshfield wrote that hope is the hardest love we carry. But carry it we do because we hope, against all reason, that the heavy, dark days of loss are really just a shadow, a blink in the eyes of eternity.