Where is Grandma Zoe?
Today is my grandma Zoe’s birthday. She would have been 80 if she hadn’t died so calamitously in 2009.
I was 17 when she died and my memories of her last few months flash by like a well rehearsed montage. First my mom got a call from Grandma letting her know that she had cancer. We were not surprised or worried. Of my four grandparents, Grandma Zoe was the third to get cancer, and the others had been treated and moved on within a year without much fuss. Grandma’s prognosis was good and we expected nothing different from what we’d seen before. It would be wrapped up in a year and wasn’t even much to worry about in the meantime. Grandma had also been in poor health for years, struggling with weight, limited mobility and a general case of grumpiness, so cancer’s appearance on the scene actually seemed overdue.
Grandma’s diagnosis took a huge backseat to the other half of her call—an apology. Looking back now, my mom and grandma didn’t have much more than the usual adult-child/parent tension. There had been disappointments and frustrations that I’ve learned just come with the territory of growing up and growing independent and then having to watch your siblings do it too (and differently! how dare they!). But there had been plenty of frustration for years on end and in less than 10 minutes grandma Zoe managed to consummate one of the great miracles of my lifetime and erase (no—heal) years of hurt. And to my mom’s credit she grabbed hold of the miracle and hasn’t let go for 14 years. A few days later mom got a purse in the mail from Grandma. Covered in red silk roses, small and expensive looking, the bag was completely out of place for a mom with six kids at home and it became the ultimate symbol of the miraculous reconciliation between mother and daughter.
In the next scene, I had ridden my bike to Bob’s Brain Freeze for Salt Lake City’s best shaved ice. I had packed a watterbottle full of cream to drizzle on top and save the $0.50 they charged. My phone rang and it was Mom—“come home now we’re driving to California in 15 minutes to say goodbye to Grandma.” And so we drove through the night straight to the hospital overlooking Torrey Pines beach where I gave a command performance of hymns on my viola. I only remember that Grandma requested Abide With Me—of which there are two versions—and I could only remember the tune to the wrong one.
And then not long after, I woke up one morning and Mom had flown to California. Grandma had held on until Mom could get there and died shortly after.
It had all happened in just a few months. And I hardly cared.
Don’t get me wrong. I was sad, but it had been years since Grandma had held me on her lap drawing pictures of pirates with swords and eye patches and she hadn’t made up a pig story for me in at least a decade. Just like my mom and grandma had grown apart, the growing swath of grandchildren and my own teenage independence had meant that Grandma hadn’t been in my life much for quite a while. I was sad, but Grandma had already been receding from my life for the last ten years and I was 17.
And then things got really bad. Within months Grandpa had gone from the dutifully (and sincerely) mournful husband to an engagement with his longtime co-worker (who was, by the way, closer to my mom’s age than his own, had been a serious source of tension between my grandparents my entire life and, and was extremely ugly and mean). You, reader, will be shocked to learn that this pushed my mother and her sister to the brink of insanity (and often over). And the new wife played the part of evil step-m - - - - - r perfectly, taunting my mom and aunt and declaring her general dislike for every member of my grandpa’s family up to that point. She made it clear that Grandpa (and more importantly his money) were now hers and we were no longer welcome. And the saddest thing of all is that Grandpa still married her.
What followed with my grandpa, my mom, her sister, her brothers, their children, spouses, and 15 grandchildren is a almost a decade and a half (and counting) of greek-like tragedy and is obviously a story (or several hundred) for another day.
Today’s story picks up again one year ago today. I was sitting in my office putting the date on a document (that’s basically a lawyer’s entire job) when I realized it was August 24 and that was Grandma’s birthday. I had never known my grandma’s birthday until that moment but suddenly I knew it and everything stopped for a moment. I looked around to see if someone had been standing behind me, dropping this new fact into my brain, but it was just me, alone, staring at the date, in the bottom right hand corner of my computer screen.
And then I remembered a few years before when the family cat Lucy died and my parents buried her under a flagstone under the rose arch. Lucy had been an old grumpy cat (just like Grandma) and when she died I felt the first shots of real grief. Somehow it had been like Grandma lived on in that grumpy black and white cat (did I mention she was grumpy? Well you would be two if you had been the cat of my five-year-old sister who showed her love to you by swinging you around by your stomach). And when Lucy died, Grandma Zoe had finally died too and I would sit and stare at the flagstone wondering why Grandma left.
And then there was the time that Grandpa (he texts occasionally but we rarely see him) had texted a picture of a page from Grandma’s journal. In her notes one day in the mid-nineties she had written, in her loopy handwriting, about picking up bagels with strawberry cream cheese (my favorite) and then brining Kyoto (the best Japanese restaurant in Salt Lake City) to us for lunch (two food deliveries in one day?! How did I not know I had the dream grandma?). And then, THEN she recorded a fight between me (a four year old) and my best friend Sammie from down the street over a yellow bucket. Have I mentioned that Sammie is now MY WIFE?! Grandma Zoe had met my wife!
Today, I am thirty-one and one-half and ten days old and I am married and I have two little boys who Grandma has never met and I have no Grandma Zoe. Did I not know I had the dream grandma?