My admiration and enjoyment of other families’ relationships with their children had turned to bitterness and anger. Why were their children still here to enjoy and my child so forever gone? This truth brought my steps to the edge of the park where a young Shawn had flapped his arms in a swimming pool and launched his skinny hiney down a slide. I watched a father and two small children. They ran as only excited youth can run—with total abandonment— across the mud and grass of the park toward playground equipment.
A bright new BMW was the only car in the parking area. Withdrawing into my thoughts, memories of my son returned, and I tramped on, vainly attempting to find comfort in the flowers and sunshine of a spring day. When reaching the corner where I planned to stop and head home, my body turned as if on autopilot, and with lagging footsteps I passed the park again. Playtime was over. The children and dad moved toward the new Beemer.
The father’s voice rose a shrill octave when he yelled directions at the smaller boy, “Son, don’t run across the wet ground. You’ll get mud all over Daddy’s new car.”
My hands itched to grab him by the neck and throttle him until he became a symbol for shaken-adult syndrome. Didn’t he know the importance of time spent with those two small children? Weren’t the treasured memories they would build together worth more than the cost of vacuuming out a little mud? My fantasies grew as I rehearsed a myriad of biting words to arrest his attention and cause him to rethink his approach. None of the words reached my lips. I hiked past the park and back home.
The experience served as directive to my grief-stricken heart. I had two choices on handling the rest of my life. I could serve as a watchdog when witnessing parent-child problems of this nature—issuing stern warnings of future consequences; or I could pursue a softer approach by urging parents to spend more quality time with their children. I chose the latter.
A clearer understanding of my anger and jealousy— concerning parenting situations—began to emerge. I realized the foolishness of resenting others’ relationships with their children. They had not caused my loss. A drunk driver and my son’s decision to leave the safety of his hotel were the culprits. How could I resent time others spent with their kids regardless of weak parenting skills? Grieving for loss of time spent with my son didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy theirs. Grabbing this new reality by the throat resulted in a new dimension of walking through hot coals of guilt and anguish.
Attempts to analyze each new parenting situation began to bear fruit. I realized my words today carried the added weight of a grieving mother. Now when friends complained of problems with their teenagers, I attempted to give solace and understanding. Communicating stories of my own soul-searching through similar problems became the norm, instead of caustic be-glad-you-still-have-them words.
The greatest progress made in my healing quest occurred two years later when addressing junior- and senior-high church youth groups prior to prom week. Telling my story in the hope of saving a youngster’s life did more for me than for them. Interacting with each bunch prior to the meeting quenched some of my thirst for quality time. Receiving their warm hugs afterwards gave me comfort beyond measure.
My husband and I sat at a local Sonic drive-in enjoying a Sunday evening hamburger. We watched a picnic table where a young family ate burgers with their two small children. The older child bore a strange resemblance to our son at age six.
Hyperactive, with small cheeks stuffed with fries, he quickly got into trouble. We tuned in to the event when we heard him whine, “Please Daddy, I promise to be good.” The father smiled and gave him another chance.
Turning to my husband in the car I said, “Doesn’t that sound like Shawn at that age? ”We couldn’t resist playing peek-a-boo with him. He joined into the rhythm of the activity, miming faces and hiding behind his kid-meal sack. His parents seemed to enjoy the game as much as we did.
For just a moment the old resentments flared to see a child so full of life, and I gulped back the sob forming in my chest. But grief homework from the last few months held me in check. Words of my assistant-principal friend galloped through my mind. Tomorrow is not promised. The promise of tomorrow thrives with helping others.
Rita Billbe
9
A
GRAND-
Ifyour baby is “beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time . . .”
you’re the grandma.
Teresa Bloomingdale
off the mark by Mark Parisi
www.offthemark.com
Reprinted by permission from Mark Parisi. ©2003.
A Dance with My Grandmother
When I married my wife, Martha, it was the most beautiful day of my life. We were young and healthy, tanned and handsome. Every picture taken that day shows us smiling, hugging and kissing. We were the perfect hosts, never cranky or tired, never rolling our eyes at pinched cheeks or embarrassing stories from friends and loved ones. We were as happy and carefree as the porcelain couple on our towering wedding cake.
Halfway through the reception, in between the pictures and the cake and the garter and the bouquet, my grandmother tapped me gently on the shoulder. I hugged her in a flurry of other well-wishers and barely heard her whisper, “Will you dance with me, sweetheart?”
“Sure, Nonny,” I said, smiling and with the best of intentions, even as some out-of-town guests pulled me off in their direction. An hour later my grandmother tried again. And again I blew her off, smiling and reaching for her with an outstretched hand but letting some old college buddies place a fresh beer there instead, just before dragging me off for some last-minute wedding night advice!
Finally, my grandmother gave up.
There were kisses and hugs and rice and tin cans and then my wife and I were off on our honeymoon. A nagging concern grew in the back of my mind as we wined and dined our way down to Miami for a weeklong cruise and then back again when it was over.
When we finally returned to our new home, a phone message told us our pictureswerewaiting at the photographer’s. We unpacked slowly and then moseyed on down to pick them up. Hours later, after we had examined every one with fond memories, I held one out to reflect upon in private.
It was a picture of two happy guests, sweaty and rowdy during the inevitable “chicken dance.” But it wasn’t the grinning couple I was focusing on. There, in the background, was my grandmother, Nonny.
I had spotted her blue dress right away. Her simple pearls. The brand-new hairdo I knew she’d gotten special for that day, even though she was on a fixed income. I saw her scuffed shoes and a run in her stocking and her tired hands clutching at a well-used handkerchief.
In the picture, my grandmother was crying. And I didn’t think they were tears of joy. That nagging concern that had niggled at me the entire honeymoon finally solidified: I had never danced with my grandmother.
I kissed my wife on the cheek and drove to my grandmother’s tiny apartment a few miles away. I knocked on the door and saw that her new perm was still fresh and tight, but her tidy blue dress had been replaced with her usual faded housedress.
A feeble smile greeted me, weak arms wrapped around me and, naturally, Nonny wanted to know all about our honeymoon. Instead, all I could do was apologize.
“I’m sorry I never danced with you, Nonny,” I said honestly, sitting next to her on the threadbare couch. “It was a very special day and that was the only thing missing from making it perfect.”
Nonny looked me in the eye and said something I’ll never forget: “Nonsense, dear. You’ve danced enough with this old broad in her lifetime. Remember all those Saturday nights you spent here when you were a little boy? I’d put “The Lawrence Welk Show” on and you’d dance on top of my fuzzy slippers and laugh the whole time. Why, I don’t know any other grandmother who has memories like that. I’m a lucky woman.
“And while you were being the perfect host and making all of your guests feel so special, I sat back and watched
you and felt nothing but pride. That’s what a wedding is, honey. Something old, something new. Something borrowed, something blue.
“Well, this OLD woman, who was wearing BLUE, watched you dance with your beautiful NEW bride, and I knew I had to give you up, because I had you so many years to myself, but I could only BORROW you until you found the woman of your dreams—and now you have each other and I can rest easy in the knowledge that you’re happy.”
Both of our tears covered her couch that day—the day that Nonny taught me what it meant to be a grandson— as well as a husband.
And after my lesson, I asked Nonny for that wedding dance.
Unlike me, she didn’t refuse. . . .
Rusty Fischer
Mended Hearts and Angel Wings
I broke the angel’s wing the year my grandmother died. I was ten, Nana was eighty and the angel was older than both of us put together. Nana had lived with us for as long as I could remember, and that was fine with me because she had neat stuff like tiny cases of perfume and powder and a sewing box with fancy buttons and bits of lace, and she let me play in her room whenever I wanted to. I was the youngest in my family and usually in the way or trying to tag along with somebody. Nana was special because she was the only one who actually wanted me around.
Breaking the angel’s wing and Nana being sick enough to die, both seemed impossible to me. I knew how easily things could break, and I knew that people died, but I was certain something as precious to Nana as that angel could never break, and someone as precious to me as Nana could never die.
Nana’s angel was a Christmas angel, a gift from her grandmother long ago. Each year when the decorations were brought down from the attic, we opened the angel’s box, carefully unwrapped the tissue paper and the angel would emerge, pure and sparkling to take her place behind the cradle in the crèche.
She never stayed where we put her though; she moved around as if she could really fly. She sometimes landed next to the telephone, where nervous hands fingered her delicate wings while talking, or she perched on a desk to watch over an anxious teenager studying for exams. Sometimes she would alight on the windowsill by the kitchen sink where my mother scrubbed and whispered prayers for a daughter or a son or, the year Nana was sick, for her mother.
That year everyone was praying for Nana. Christmas approached but not nearly as gaily as it usually did. I unwrapped the angel by myself that year, and she wasn’t the same either. Her china white gown, her crystal blue eyes and the gold ribbons around her waist still sparkled, but somehow she seemed like a fake angel, not a real one. She sat in the crèche forlorn and untouched.
Nana stayed in bed night and day and our house got quieter and quieter. One morning I brought the angel up to her. She held it in her soft wrinkled hand and stared at it for so long that I started to feel bad because it seemed to make her sad, and I thought she might cry. But she turned to me and smiled and in a whisper I could barely hear she told me to take good care of her little angel. I wondered if she meant me, but before I could ask her, she drifted off to sleep. She never spoke to me or to anyone else again.
Nana died before Christmas came that year. Everyone said I handled it well. They talked to me about death, saying how it’s a part of life; they told me how good I had been to Nana and how God needed her to care for little children in heaven as she had cared for all of us. They said it was okay to miss her, and it was okay to cry. I listened and nodded, but their words made no sense to me because none of it was real. I couldn’t grasp that Nana had really left me. Until I broke the angel’s wing.
Christmas was over, and I was wrapping the angel gently in extra folds of tissue paper when my brother threw his new football at me, shouting, “Catch!” a second too late like he always did. The ball hit my arm, and the angel fell in slow motion down onto the kitchen floor where her wing broke away from her white china gown and shattered into pieces.
I cried then. Loud, aching sobs that I had hidden inside came tumbling out as I realized for the first time how final death is. How real and how wrong that Nana, my best and often only friend in the whole world, was gone forever.
Everyone made a big fuss over me then and sent all sorts of cards and gifts trying, I guessed, to fill the giant empty space in my heart. Time did ease the pain, but sometimes all it took was a whiff of perfume or the sight of an old white head in a church pew, and I would feel an aching tug in my heart.
I forgot about the angel until the next Christmas. As I slowly unwrapped the tissue inside her box, I began to imagine that if the angel was healed, I would be too; maybe all those tugs on my heart had been Nana sewing it back together up in heaven. Just as she had mended my torn clothes, she had been mending my broken heart with those memories and signs, telling me she wasn’t gone and never would be.
I don’t know who fixed the angel, and I never tried to find out, because it would have stolen the precious wonder and peace I felt when I held the mended figure in my hand. It was my first glimpse of the tremendous power of love and faith that is so much stronger than death.
Many Christmases have passed since then, and many stages of my life: from child to woman to mother to grandmother, and my belief in that power has never dimmed, but strengthened, just as surely as the angel’s beauty has never dulled, but brightened.
I have seen Nana’s eyes in each new baby I’ve held, felt her touch in each gentle embrace I’ve shared, and spoken to her and been answered in every prayer I’ve whispered. I feel her hand on mine every year as I unwrap the angel. And when I tell the story, I know that she’s listening and watching and smiling with me.
Anne S. Cook
Sacred Cows
A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.
Source Unknown
Last weekend my grandson noticed for the first time the cow skull I have hanging on the living-room wall. As a longtime admirer of Georgia O’Keeffe, painter-laureate of the Southwest, I came home from Santa Fe several years ago with one of those bleached skulls that have become a trademark, of sorts, for her and her desert art. It hangs on the wall just to the left of my front door, and I use its horns as a hat rack.
One day I walked into the room and found four-year-old Bennett standing stock-still beneath it, a dead-serious expression letting me know his little mind was whirling. So I stood by him, not saying a word, just to give him moral support wherever he was going with this new discovery.
It was a full minute before he turned to me and asked:
“Did you kill it?”
Before I could say a word, he shot a mouthload of more questions: “Did you shoot it with a gun or stab it with a knife?”
“How did you get the skin off?” And, finally: “Why do you have dead things on your wall?”
I tried to explain, going into way too much detail, about Georgia O’Keeffe and how she painted pictures of the desert; and because deserts are so dry, lots of cows and other animals die in the heat; and the sun beats down on the bones and turns them white and blah blah blah.
Bennett didn’t get it.
“Did a cow die in your yard and turn white, and so you picked it up and hung it on your wall, so you could think about O’Creep?”
One of the things Bennett and I like to do together is drive over to the pasture about half a mile from my house and visit the cows. Occasionally one of the cows in that pasture gets loose and wanders around in the neighborhood. He and I had found one in the middle of the road and had to go knock on the owner’s door to tell him to come get his cow before somebody ran over it. Bennett’s question was not all that far-fetched.
I explained that actually I’d bought the cow skull at a flea market, that out West there are lots of cows, and people sell their skulls to tourists as a kind of souvenir of the desert. We then made a short detour in the conversation while I explained what a flea market was. He wanted to know why there were no fleas at a flea market, but there were cows. Why wasn’t it a cow market?
“Good question,” I said.
“I live in the West,” says Bennett when we got back on the subject of skulls, “and we don’t have cows.”
“Well,” said I, “Houston is not the desert. The cows I was talking about were desert cows that died in the sun and a famous artist painted them as a symbol for her part of the country—its austerity and its beauty.”
“I don’t think a dead cow is very beautiful,” Bennett says. “I think it’s really sad. ”He looked up at me, such a mournful expression in the drop-dead beautiful eyes he got from his mother and grandfather. “I think you should take it down and bury it in the backyard and put a nice sign over it so God can take it up to heaven with all the other cows.”
I was stumped. What’s a grandmother to do? Should I rip it off the wall and have a cow funeral? I hate to admit it, but the skull cost me eighty dollars. It makes a great hat rack, and to me it really does represent a part of the country I love for its hard edges and sun-baked magic. To me that landscape is about life, its challenges and sacrifices. I think of it as the workshop of creation, with its blazing lights and fearful clouds, its muscular, bone-bare mesas and flowers that surprise with their audacity to bloom where they are planted, no matter what. That skull means a lot to me. Besides it makes a great conversation piece.
Except in this case.
“When you get a little older, you’ll understand,” I said, wanting to kick myself the minute I said it. I had hated that phrase when I was a kid. “When you grow up you’ll understand” was a cop-out for adults too lazy or too dumb to explain things properly. But leave it to Bennett to get the last word. “My daddy’s a grown-up and he wouldn’t like dead cow heads hanging on the wall. . . .”