posted by Paige on Uncategorized

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Winter, 1989 / Eleven years old

We sit at the dining room table in companionable silence, my grandmother and I, cigarette smoke and a TV laugh track wafting in from the next room.

A box of old papers lays between us and I shuffle through them, occasionally finding one interesting enough to remove and read aloud. When I was small, she held me on her lap in her rocking chair, reading picture books and teaching me to sound out words. But ever since she lost most of her vision as a complication of diabetes, I’ve become the reader between us.

She’s childlike now, after her stroke last year, and while sometimes she sits in rapt attention as I read, other times she abruptly gets up and leaves, as if she can’t bear to stay still any longer.

Now she folds her hands in her lap and stares off into space with mostly unseeing eyes. Her face is open and peaceful, and I wonder what she’s thinking about.

Removing a tiny slip of brown-edged newspaper from the box, I scan down to find that it’s an obituary for someone with my grandmother’s exact name. I glance at her, curious, but she doesn’t look back at me.

“Hey, Gram?” I say. She turns toward me, her expression calm and pleasant. In this moment she really does look to me like a child, innocent and unreservedly loving. “Why’s there an obituary with your name on it in here?”

Before I even finish speaking, she drops her chin to her chest, face crumpling into despair. Confused, I look back at the paper and see that the birth and death dates are both in October, but only days apart. I look at her again, distraught by her anguish.

Standing, I take her face in my arms and press her to me, rocking her and laying my cheek against her cloud of soft white hair.

In a jolt of understanding I remember that one of my grandmother’s sisters had been named after their mother, and that another of her sisters had named a daughter after herself. Could this have been my grandmother’s baby? Why had no one ever told me?

Later, my mother will give me the story in its broadest outlines: her newborn sister left in the hospital for a simple surgery, the hospital volunteer who called my grandmother to brusquely report, “Your baby died. You need to come get her now.”

But right now I know none of that. Right now all I know is the pain of the beloved person in my arms, the undulating rhythm of her sobs, the soaking of her tears through my t-shirt.

Behind me the floor creaks, and I hear my mother’s sharp intake of breath.

“What happened?” she asks, moving toward us. Her voice, heavy with sympathy and love, is the one she uses when one of her children is hurt. It’s the voice that enfolds with its tenderness, the voice that aches to make it all better.