On this day in 1936, my grandmother was born. She was an amazing woman, as I’ve written before, and probably the most singular force in my life for the first two decades of it. She had a really rough upbringing that I don’t want to dwell on now, but that very tragic upbringing made her the best grandma in the world. She always spoiled the hell out of me and told me “that’s what grandma’s are for- to give their grandkids everything they never had.”
I’ll never forget the way she dug into her ice cream as she said something like this. In many ways, she relived her childhood- the childhood she always wanted- through her grandchildren. Me especially. I know no one is ever supposed to say this out loud but I and my baby brother were her favorites. She loved all of her grandkids deeply but baby bro and I, we were the apex. The best. The favorites.
It’s really hard for me to type these words, but after my grandma died I resented my mother. I didn’t feel like my mom appreciated what I had lost, and I knew my mom was almost always irritated by grandma, and it really pissed me off that she didn’t even seem to realize what happened.
That my grandma was gone. The woman I ran to when no one else wanted was no longer there. That the woman who offered wisdom through cryptic weirdness (“no one takes a frump seriously”) was no longer there.
I thought that somehow my mom’s resentments toward her mother somehow overrode her grief.
Of course, that was not true.
I was a stupid 19 year old who thought she knew everything but I would never, and could never, understand the depth of my mom’s grief.
One night between the night my grandma died and before her funeral, my mom and I were alone at my grandma’s house. Even though there were three beds in the house, we pulled out the hide-a-bed and laid together in there. We were both exhausted. We both cried. I had been the one who found my grandma and I felt incredibly guilty for not finding her sooner, when I could have saved her. I apologized to my mom for that and she hugged me. “Honey, I promise, grandma would have never wanted this to happen to you.”
And then we started laughing.
We flipped through old photo albums and my mom told me stories about the faces she remembered. But then we came upon a photo- you know, those old-timey photos where everyone is straight-faced, of our unknown ancestors. “It’s so weird how they never smiled back in photos back then, isn’t it?” I said.
“Well, it wouldn’t be so weird if they didn’t look like they had a pickle up their ass” my mom answered.
We both busted up into uncontrollable laughter. All the angst, sadness, regret, anger, grief, came out in a ball of hysteria. We flipped through the pages of the photo album and would pick out a person from a photo and shriek “PICKLE!” and then collapse into laughter again.
Once we had exhausted ourselves from laughter, my mom asked me to grab my notebook. “I want to speak,” she said “and I want you to just write down what I say.”
I did as she asked, until I realized she was crafting the eulogy for my grandma. “Mom, no,” I said. “Just two weeks ago grandma said no child should ever have to eulogize their parent. You can’t do this!”
“Annie,” she said, staring up at the ceiling, “please just keep writing.”
I did as I was told.
My mom laid there with her hands behind her head, staring upwards but not focused on anything, and I wrote every word she said. Sitting next to her at that moment I should have recognized the depth of her grief. I should have known how much she was hurting, how her whole life had been upended.
But instead I thought about my grandma. And I had the audacity to be angry on her behalf that my mom was expressly dismissing her belief that a child shouldn’t eulogize a parent.
(This belief of my grandma’s was a newfound one, as I watched her plan the funeral of her own mother and she insisted one of her mother’s children should give the eulogy, as long as they weren’t going to be full of shit.)
Anyway, we wrote the eulogy, and then laid in bed and talked about this and that. Still trying to make each other laugh, but also still crying a bit here and there.
Then there was a knock at the door right when we’d cracked each other up over “PICKLE!” again.
It was the coroner, and he was obviously taken aback by the sight of my mom and I having giggle fits while he explained to us the logistics of what was happening to my grandma’s body. I tried so hard to keep a straight face while he spoke; my mom pulled the covers over her head and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying under the blankets. But the coroner said “…and then we’ll take the body to cremate it” and my mom pulled the covers down enough to look up at me and whisper “pickle!” and I laughed and laughed and thanked the coroner for his time.
He backed slowly out of the house and we never saw him again.