But Also

My grandmother - my mother’s mother - was Annie.  I don't know terribly much about her except for bits and bobs sewn together across chance discussions, the kind when someone else in your family feels their memory tugged and a fragment slips out. My time with her was mostly relegated to the end of her life, when her fingers were a gaggle of knotted knuckles bent with arthritis and her dementia had her throwing away the family silver after meals. Her scoliosis bent her into a question mark, which strikes me as part of the strange way life capitulates us to the wide unknown, having stripped us of heady, youthful promises.

She had been a 1950’s housewife to a man whose charm was a publicity piece. In the private moments of their marriage he was incredibly rough with her. My own mother recalled standing in the kitchen at age seven, bluntly telling her “You know you have to leave him, right?” It was probably about 1959.  You can guess that she didn’t go anywhere, but honestly, where the hell could she have gone.

A brilliant photographer in a backwater little Dutch place, Pepsi solicited her work for advertisements. Some of her photos are so tender, I stammer thinking what she might have done had her circumstances - namely her time - been even a little different in either direction. 

She’d also survived some medical catastrophes but thanks to the era’s cloak of shame, (pronounced “decency” then) as her descendants we’ll never know what. She underwent a risky surgery while my mother was in utero and at birth they ripped out everything in a radical hysterectomy. Imagine menopause, surgery, and motherhood all in the same day. Without hormone therapy. Or postpartum depression counseling. We watch as breast cancers have popped up in her daughters and all their childhood friends and wonder if it was the oil refinery they were near their entire childhoods and the lack of environmental protections, (pronounced “decency” today) or if it is an heirloom cancer. We don’t know because my grandparents never disclosed what was happening to even their closest friends. 

In the semi-independent living facility and impressively able to speak English mixed with Dutch despite her gummed up mind, I asked her for life advice. Her gaze moved inward for a moment and a curled little hand met her tilted head at the mouth,

“You must always be honest. But - also, with yourself.”