Writing by Ruth Schreiber
My grandmother’s birthday was two weeks ago. She passed away in September, and I didn’t know her the way I wanted to- she had dementia. Frayed, stained photographs from the 50s show her when she was around my age. Her hair was pinned up, curly wisps hanging loose around her face. She wore ankle skimming skirts with spirited patterns. The crinoline that went underneath was always pressed to keep her skirt bouncy and full. My mother keeps telling stories about my grandmother, like how she met her best friend at a JC Penny while searching for towels. Striking up a conversation with the lonely salesclerk, giving her a home phone number, and saying “call later tonight”. My grandmother’s skirts displayed her best qualities, her bubbly personality constantly fizzing over with a willingness to meet strangers, and search for a bouncy and full life.
My mother is sad. She spent the last three years taking care of her own mother who woke up in the middle of the night scared because there was a stranger in the house. She had to take care of a woman who took care of her.
I am sad too- life is feeling like a wound that won’t heal properly. I have taken to looking at the picture hanging in my father’s office of my mother, holding my oldest brother Sam when he was a baby. She wears a purple turtleneck and blue, beaded hoop earrings. A worn in leather jacket engulfs her, wraps her in its arms. Her signature dark fuchsia red lipstick is painted on her lips. The one I watched her put on in front of the mirror every day, the same color even when she switched brands.
When the pandemic hit, my mother drove three hours every week on Friday’s, to see my grandmother from outside a fence for twenty minutes. She is someone who’d never miss a Friday, willing to stand outside in the rain for my grandmother. In the photograph, she holds my brother to her chest, her blue eyes kind and her red lips assertive and strong.
I do not have the signature style that my grandmother and mother have. I don’t wear full circle skirts, or only that one shade of fuchsia red lipstick. I don't know what my own clothing says about me, I'm constantly searching. Since I have been home though, I have taken to wearing my mother’s clothes, and my grandmother’s earrings. The green knit sweater I saw lying on my mother’s bed. The silver heart earrings that feel like something out of a seventies dream, found in my grandmother’s jewelry box after she passed away.
I’ve always been close to my mother, but I had a complex relationship with my grandmother. I was angry at her for something that wasn’t her fault. I didn’t drive every Friday with my steadfast mother to see her, the dementia pushed me away. Seeing them in these photographs, seeing their clothing, forces me to understand them- hold the sweater and earrings close by, persevere through the pain and acknowledge their lives down to the bones. I feel the unbreakable, leather rope tying me to them. Little fragments of them sit on me, and the sweater doesn’t make me itchy and the earrings dangle like little chandeliers made for me.
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