The last Christmas my paternal grandma was alive, she leaned over to my sister and I at the dinner table and said, kind of quietly but with the confidence only old people have, “These noodles look like vaginas.”
I’d heard her say plenty of naughty things over the years, but never vagina. Jesus. The three of us—and everyone who overheard—lost it. What an unbelievably inappropriate and true thing to say on the day of our lord, grandma Gretch. She was fun like that.
I feel like I’m getting to know her better now that she’s gone, which is a shame. But I think it’s because I’m becoming more and more like her as I get older, and I’m told I look like her, which is great because she was a fox. She was funny. Maybe I’m funny!
One of my most vivid memories with my Grandma Gretch is sitting on the daybed at her house eating mindlessly from a massive bowl of potato chips and watching hours and hours of Land before Time. Grandma would sit in a glider and fall asleep, and then she’d fart and wake herself up and blame the fart on me.
When she died I was a junior in high school and on the brink of a mental breakdown. I think maybe her death triggered my stumble into clinical depression, or maybe it was just coincidental. I was very sad and anxious and refused to go to her wake, which upset my sister a lot and probably others in my family. I would say I regret it, but I don’t, because that decision taught me a lot about grief. My maternal grandpa’s death taught me a lot about grief, too, and so did working at a funeral home, but those are stories for another day.
Maybe I should have gone to my grandma’s wake. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to see and remember her in a casket. It wasn’t because I’m an asshole and a terrible granddaughter. I just…didn’t want to go. I was sad, and so anxious that I felt sick, and going anywhere—especially somewhere explicitly sad—would not have helped me grieve or feel better. My family honoring that choice, though it was a battle hard-won that made me feel terrible initially, was a good exercise in autonomy and listening to my gut.
Most religions have pretty strict—or at least faithfully followed—death rituals. I was raised Catholic which meant there’d be a wake, where we’d all look at the body of the deceased and be sad about it, then a funeral the next day where we’d do pretty much the same thing, but with a mass and then a burial and then a sad, weird lunch in a church basement.
I hate funerals. Most people do. They don’t bring me closure. They don’t make me feel better. They feel arbitrarily ritualized and very rarely do a good job of honoring the deceased (more on that another time). It feels performative, but necessary, and bucking against those rituals feels sacrilegious and rude. I guess maybe it is.
So I skipped my grandma’s wake, and I’m sure nobody really cared all that much in the end. It wasn’t such a big deal. Grandma sure as shit didn’t care. She’d just as happily have had me at home eating potato chips and watching a cartoon if that’s what I wanted.
I didn’t even know my grandma was sick until she was really sick. Because my parents had divorced when I was very young, I rarely saw my father’s side of my family as I got older. Grandma and Grandpa came to visit and drop off magazines for my mom from time to time, and always sent a birthday card, but I didn’t spend nearly as much time with them as I wish I had. My big sister was closer with that side of the family, so she knew Grandma was in the hospital and that things weren’t looking good, and then she had to come home from college for the funeral.
I remember two things about my grandma’s funeral: first, that my grandpa cried very, very hard during the burial and I’d never seen him cry before (he cries a lot now, whenever he talks about her) and second, that after the luncheon everyone took home gallon Ziplock bags of leftover Polish sausage, and the Polish sausage was, like, the best I’d ever had.
What I remember more clearly is my Aunt Mickey’s funeral, which was a few years before Grandma Gretch’s. I was young when Mickey got sick and I didn’t know her terribly well, but she was silly and full of love and joy just like my grandma. Her daughters were my big sister’s age, and I used to go with my grandma when I was little to play with my cousins while grandma vacuumed and dusted with unmatched precision. (I think of her whenever I see crisp vacuum lines in a carpet.)
At Mickey’s funeral, the priest tripped over a rug on his way in, a member of the band made many horrible mistakes, and several other inconsequential but startling mishaps distracted us. I don’t remember who, but someone—my aunt Pam, probably—leaned over to me and whispered, “That’s Mickey,” in reference to all the ways things had gone off the rails. Of course, I thought. Her last gift was to make us laugh at her funeral. Like I said, I was raised Catholic. I don’t really know what I believe in now, but I believe in that.
What a lucky thing to have a family full of funny ladies who take care to make you laugh when you feel your very worst.
When Grandma Gretch died she left a shitload of costume jewelry for us to dig through. On that side of my family are five granddaughters, of which I am the baby, and one year at Thanksgiving or Christmas the five of us filed down to the basement to root through Rubbermaid totes of Grandma’s stuff to decide what we wanted to keep.
This death ritual—the doling out of the deceased’s belongings among family members—has always felt strange to me, but I guess it’s nice when there’s no bitterness about who gets the good crystal, or whatever. Anyway, I had little use for costume jewelry, so I got one of Grandma’s big chunky gold rings—which I never once remembered seeing on her arthritic hands—and, more importantly, an old pin with two Scottie dogs on it.
The pin is extremely ugly. It’s plastic, and it was once red but has since faded to a kind of dusty dark orange, and the heads of the two Scottie dogs spin 360 degrees, for some reason. I used to have it pinned to my backpack, but the pin part fell off—revealing several layers of superglue that had been applied to fix it once or twice before—and somehow I didn’t lose the little dogs. Now it lives in my purse, and it gets transferred from the fall/winter purse to the spring/summer purse with my wallet and tampons and hair elastics and all the rest. When I feel shitty I like to look at those two ugly dogs and think of my silly grandma and where in god’s name she would have possibly worn a pin like that.
It’s funny the things we remember about people when they’re gone. My memories of my grandma remind me of the scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams’ character is talking about his late wife:
“One night her fart was so loud it woke the dog up, she woke up and said, ‘Was that you?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her. […] She’s been dead two years and that’s the shit I remember, wonderful stuff. These are the things I miss the most, these idiosyncrasies that only I know. That’s what made her my wife and she had the goods on me too. She knew all my peccadillos. People call these things imperfections… that’s the good stuff. “
When I think of my maternal grandpa, who I’ll write more about another time, I remember very vividly how he’d squeeze the back of my neck—affectionately, but always too hard—and ask, “Whaddaya know, Lexer?” And because I have always been an introvert and poor conversationalist, I’d say, “Not much” or “Nothing” and he’d laugh. I also think about the time I wandered around the yard pulling all the little leaves off the ferns in the raised beds because the way they slipped off in my hands felt so satisfying. When my grandpa saw the stripped fronds I could tell he was furious, and he asked me why I’d do something like that. I didn’t have an answer, of course. Nobody ever scolded me for it, which leads me to believe my grandpa kept it to himself (or at least told my mom and grandma to leave it alone), understanding that sometimes kids do dumb stuff for no reason. Like my grandma Gretch, I think of my grandpa when I see crisp, perfectly parallel lines of freshly cut grass.
Maybe what I’m getting at is that grief looks different to everyone, and in many ways I think I’ve been able to summon joy from it. Those idiosyncrasies, the funny, offbeat memories we have of the people we love are special. And though it shouldn’t take losing someone to reflect on and enjoy those memories, it sure helps when you’re missing them.
Here’s to the ones we miss. May your thoughts of them be full of whimsy and silliness.
Lexie
Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Joy in Grief”:
Gilead by Marianne Robinson
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
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