Three Years

An anniversary

I was anxious at the airport on the way back home from D.C. three years ago today. Later, when I told my husband that I always thought I’d know Granny was nearing death, he reminded me of how I felt while sitting at the gate. I was a chaos of bad feelings then and since consciousness. Everything and nothing was an intuition because of it.

Fred and I got in Mom’s car in the airport, and everything was our normal. Maybe for my mom it was also because of the chaos of wrongs in her life that made these events that should seem so set apart from reality, so fundamental and grandly awful, tolerable.

We weren’t yet on 85 south when Mom told me that Granny would soon die. Not in a few days. That very night. Mom hadn’t called me to tell me this because she didn’t want my last memory of her to be of the sudden change to her body, the further sinking of her mind and function within her. But my last memory of the Granny I knew was 7 years earlier, when I was 22 and she woke me up calmly to tell me she was going to the hospital and to not miss class.

Even on a stretcher being life flighted to Atlanta, Granny said, “Don’t miss class.” I missed class.

Mom hadn’t finished telling us that we were inside of Granny’s final hours before my uncle called to say she was gone. Two months earlier, we’d stood in the parking lot, Mom, Fred, my uncle, and me and made small jokes, awkward conversation as a hearse took my grandpa away. My grandparents’ close deaths wasn’t a love story. They’d been divorced for 60 years. It wasn’t love unless there is some agreement of souls, which would be a betrayal, romantic, and comforting.

The last time I saw Granny’s physical form was in the nursing home the Tuesday before she died. She sat watching Monk in her gray armchair Mom brought there for her to assuage some of the guilt of not being able to care for Granny at home. I watched her watery green eyes and wondered what it is to only know the earth, beds, doorways, windows, televisions, simple meals, and to be leaving it soon.

I made it through the night in the room I grew up in across the hall from her bedroom. In the morning, I felt a push to go into her room, to open drawer next to her bed. I found a green, spiral notebook there.

I hesitate to tell this story because it takes some of the power from it each time when I see the blankness on the face of whoever I’m telling it to. There isn’t the write energy and wording with me yet to tell you, but our stories are not to be saved as if they can only be used once, then used up. No, I will tell this again and again in recognizable and unrecognizable ways throughout my life.

So.

I opened the notebook and read “Give this to Megan after I die,” along with a longer note that said I’d be the only one to understand it. Then, a message to me. Maybe it will help me figure out my life. And, to remember God is always with me. I skipped over the bible passages contained in the notebook until recently because of this. Now, I try to lean on my own understanding to decipher meaning.

She’d started writing it when I was 16. She finished it a week before the heart attack, stroke, and drop in the hospital that fundamentally changed her. I call the heart attack when the granny I knew died, but that is unfair to the rest of her experience of life.

I’d never seen this notebook before, despite often being a little snoop in her room with the aim of uncovering a history of her life unknowable to me.

The granny I knew was present in the pages, thinking of me and others, making plans for another business called The Rose Garden. She’d sketched a small room filled with books and a desk where I’d write, while she’d be a florist once again and mom would put together gift baskets.

Then, there was this other woman that I could have only suspected. It is because of this woman I’m writing today.

We’re told to sit down with our elders to hear their stories and get to know them because it’s awfully sad to have a greater understanding of them after they’re gone. What a shame to praise them when they can’t hear it with ears of flesh, cartilage, tiny bones.

I’ve felt this way about my grandma, but I can now hear a voice of intuition, and it says—she wouldn’t have wanted this. She wouldn’t have knowable during her life. No. Only her death could have revealed her.

My grandmother was bound her religion and the tradition that she was faithful to be a good person as she was taught and as she understood it. Yet, there was this other that I call her Self because the form and content are closer to who I am and defined by me as loosened from the ruling of that Southern Baptist Woman. Is this unfair? Of course, all people are multiple.

Last year, I spoke briefly with a high school boyfriend. He told me the timing was funny. He’d just leafing through a notebook like mine that my grandma had given to him years ago when he was going through a hard time.

I’d never known about it. He nor she had spoken of it.

It too was filled mostly with quotes and verses, thing pulled from others and composed with her understanding. This may be a retelling and type of rebellion.

It seems to me that we are all moved by some unconscious self that cannot be recognized or understood by us for this other to do its work.

I couldn’t have known the Granny of these notebooks. This is not a coping method. She never revealed herself to me, not directly or even sideways.

This version was meant for after her death. A.D. In her death, she gave me presents that go beyond the requirements of immediate care, the taking to school, making dinner, administering medicine.

The curtain closed on the first part of my life with the final closing of her eyes. It was a bright day, and I was turning off the exit in Newnan, where my childhood home is, to return another home. I saw the curtain in my mind’s eye that afternoon. This scene is still vivid in my memory.

Granny brought me to life. I’ve been committed to passion and vivacity since, beyond reason. From then and now on, beyond reason.

It is egotistical to say that a purpose of Granny’s life was to give me my life at 29. We, however, do what we must with death. We all live for others in some way. My commitment is to wrest myself from the living for others disembodied and resigned, a way of confused goodness.

She lived her life completely for others. It is difficult to not see this as tragic. Part of me must rework this for her. To live for others, by force, by want, conscious or unconscious, who is to say for sure, is an aspect of the history of women. There has to be something beyond tragedy in this.

I woke today thinking of this picture of us in the Musee d’Art Contemporain de Lyon—in the hometown of my husband. One of the rewards of life is seeing what you couldn’t in the past, meaning given and enhanced. It was December 2016. We stood and because the moment was captured, we stand in the head of a boy, probably, maybe. I stand behind her in a rainbow doorway. She looked more like the Granny of my childhood. Dark hair, glasses, wearing black and gray, solemn in photos. It is a surprise she agreed to a photo because she rarely did after she believed she’d lost her beauty. She allowed photos more often in these last trips.

How interesting that we are standing in the mind of this other. These days, I follow the obsession of imagination. I hunt down the history of ideas and let them possess me. I allow others’ imaginations as I interview seep into me because I now have the boundaries to do that after her death.

Who would she have been without the rule of culture and religion that guided her despite the person I glimpsed in her notebook and art, in the multiple marriages and short, the “Elvis” hair her family kidded her about.

Who would she, I, any of us be if we weren’t inside the imagination of another? There is no way of knowing for sure. But I approach another small death myself. It’s easier each time. It’s apparent in words on the page, finally, finally, and in a kind of madness that I resisted to the point of a medical madness. I use “madness” intentionally. I’ll romance it for myself. You don’t have to.

My Granny wouldn’t have liked me. She would have told me to go to Church.

My Granny on the page urged and urges me onwards and backwards and everywhere at once, to step outside the linear my eyes could never focus on in the first place.

My grandma’s notebook may have a greater impact than any writing success I may have in my wildest dreams I make wilder and toothier each day if we measure by emotional impact and the test of holding book to chest.

I love you. 3 years and a few months ago I believed my heart was sick and would kill me. I thought I was on fire. I’d scream with the windows down as I drove to you in Newnan and listened to “I’m on fire” by Bruce Springsteen on repeat.

I love you and so many and so much, actively. My heart is aflame. It drips its tears of fire and blood into a limpid pond where I look for your reflection. I reach through and try to touch you.

There is little editing in this. It doesn’t make sense today.