Grandma

I've been missing my grandmother recently. She died about three and a half years ago, while I was living in Japan, and I wasn't able to come home for her funeral. Her death was not unexpected. She was in her mid-seventies and she had long neglected her health.

On the night of her funeral, I had a date with a young man I met at The Kaisha. His name was Kiyokazu. I probably should have stayed home, but I didn't want to be alone, so I went out with Kazu and I got drunk--very, very drunk--so drunk that it was not any surprise to me when we went back to his apartment and he showed me that his balcony overlooked a graveyard. I laughed and told him that I was going to spit on the graves and he got very serious and pulled me back inside the apartment. I cried. I never told him that my grandmother had died and that was why I was acting strangely. I didn't want sympathy from him or anyone because I don't much like being on the receiving end of sympathy, and too, I was afraid of indulging in it in such an unfamiliar situation.

But that's me.

This is my grandmother, when she was a little girl.



She is the little girl, probably about eight years old there. That photo was probably taken in honor of her First Communion. That is one of two pictures that exist of the girl that was my grandmother. This is the other:



She is the little girl at the center of the photo. I think she's about five years old here. (I seem to remember her telling me that once.)

I don't know much about her childhood.

She once told me a story about, when she was a little girl, she watched her cat vomit up a stomach full of partially digested grasshoppers and, as a result, she was never able to eat creamed corn. After she told me that story, I was never able to eat creamed corn either.

This is my grandmother with her first and second husband, my grandfather. Yes, she married and divorced him twice. That's the kind of relationship craziness that runs in my family.



Isn't that a beautiful photo?

This is my grandmother with her third husband, Mike, and my Aunt Char. I was born around the time this photo was taken and I remember Mike, so they must have been married for at least five or six years.



I don't know much about their relationship beyond that, although my grandmother once told me that when they divorced, Mike tried and failed to take away her house, the house that my great grandfather had left her and that she had lived in her whole life.

How did my grandmother meet Mike? My grandmother was quite the bar hopper after she divorced my grandfather the second time. I seem to remember her talking about going out drinking and dancing and, in all probability, picking up men. I bet she met Mike that way. It certainly wasn't in church.

After Mike, my grandmother had boyfriends, but she never remarried. I don't think, after a certain point, that she would have been very suited for marriage. She was very independent and outspoken, two things that are deadly to women who want to stay in long-term relationships with men.

It's funny. I just realized that I don't have any photos of me and my grandmother together.

Oh, no, wait. I have one.



That was taken about a month before I left for Japan. I was so stressed that I don't remember much of that lunch, only that I ate a club sandwich and, after, posed for this photo with my grandmother in the parking lot of Village Inn.

But these two photos are mostly how I remember my grandmother:





That's her, in her housedress, in her kitchen. That is my grandmother. That is how she was for years.

I thought of Joy Harjo's poem "Death Is a Woman" when I started to write about my grandmother. The poem begins:

I walk these night hours between the dead and the living, and see
you
two-step with Death as if nothing ever ended.

It ends:

I have nothing to prove your fierce life, except paper
that turns back to dust.
Except this song that plays over and over
that you keep dancing to.

I'm not even coming close to saying what I want to say about my grandmother. I'll keep trying though.