Grandma

On November 17, 2020, 1,553 Americans died of complications resulting from COVID-19. One of them was my grandmother Charlotte. She was born in the small farming town of Rugby North Dakota in 1936. She died in the same town having lived there all her life.

The word that always comes to my mind about my grandma’s life is that it was a grind. She grew up in a rural place of muggy mosquito-filled summers and almost-supernaturally cold winters. She grew up without indoor plumbing in a home plagued with (by all family accounts) more than its fair share of alcoholism abuse and dysfunction. (Later, by the time I was around, I never really saw Grandma drink.) She washed dishes and waited tables at a nearby truck stop as a young teenager to help her family make ends meet. She met her husband and my grandfather Joe not long afterward. Joe was a veteran of the Korean War and a farmer. Pretty much everyone in Rugby was either a farmer or depended on farmers. Today Charlotte would have been considered barely old enough to go on a date or drive a car but in 1952 at the age of 16 she was married. By age 33 she had five children no employment and was a widow—she was alone in a century-old farmhouse on a tiny island of grass and gravel floating in a vast sea of austere wheat fields stretching 360-degrees to the gray horizon. In June 1969 Joe was killed by a train while he was crossing the tracks in a tractor. He had headphones on. There were no crossing arms and Joe must have been distracted too. To be honest I’ve always marveled at the devastating timing and contingency of that horrifying accident. It changed Charlotte’s life though honestly even though I’ve heard the story countless times I don’t really know exactly how it changed. I never heard her talk much about it.

She raised all her kids the best she could with the tools she had and the circumstances she was handed. That’s all a cliché that translates to a good amount of struggle pain and heartache. But I know there was also still joy and happiness and so much love and community. Joe and Charlotte had numerous friends who helped her grieve. And Joe’s life insurance left the family financially secure. Two years after Joe’s death, Charlotte remarried. The pointed omission of this man’s name from her recent obituary and a swathe of family stories that are not mine to tell say volumes about how this new partner worked out. In the words of the obituary text the marriage “was later dissolved.” During her tumultuous second marriage Charlotte was in a shattering car accident in a time and a culture in which seatbelts were an oddity. She barely survived and she carried those scars and that pain for the rest of her life as well. She continued to own the farm, and over the decades the land was worked and managed by family and friends. Still. Socially if not financially it probably wasn’t enough. As far back as I can remember Charlotte worked. She didn’t have to. But she liked it. Usually she worked as a waitress but for a time she was a motel laundry woman. She took a lot of pride in that job. The woman could smell grass and blood stains from three counties away like some sort of shark with a mean cigarette habit. Whenever we were visiting the farm she would attack any stain she found on your person as if the outcome of the next United Nations conference depended on it. It was wonderful.

“You want me to warsh that shirt, honey?” she’d say.

“No it’s fine. I’m gonna wear it for the rest of the day.”

“You sure you don’t want me to warsh it?”

“No it’s fine.”

Thirty seconds later you’d be in a new shirt and Grandma would be poring over your dirty clothing like some sort of mad scientist. Her tools of choice were weaponized soda, Oxy-Clean, and all other manner of over-the-counter chemistry equipment. She was a marvel.

She made incredible food and given that we’re talking about North Dakota—where best I could tell as a kid fresh fruits and vegetables had not yet been invented—this is really saying something. I am surprised it didn’t give everyone in the family heart disease. The foods I remember best are her apple pies. She always kept enough of them in her deep freezer to last through either an ice age or else a moderate North Dakota winter. I suspect a few of the ones toward the bottom dated to the Nixon administration. The deep freezers (she had TWO) were in the basement, which was one of those cinderblock storm shelters that was definitely haunted and yet was the only place the grandkids could escape the adults in the kitchen and their clouds of cigarette smoke and family gossip. The freezers were next to one of those kick-ass wooden console TVs from the 70s and a utility room that in retrospect was surely an entrance to hell. The freezers themselves were bottomless portals of casseroles and red meat (probably cow and deer but I wouldn’t have been shocked if some of it was human at a time or two) and tons and tons of that off-brand ice cream that is nuclear-orange and comes in plastic tubs that were clearly meant for giants. In their second life those tubs usually contained jellied pig’s feet. Some of my mom’s siblings liked to eat those right out of the fridge—I did start this paragraph with a sentence that should have warned you where it was going.

Grandma also made the best french toast I will ever eat. I’ve tried to figure out how she made it and I’m sure I could ask someone but I’ve always liked the idea that I will never have it anywhere outside of that farm kitchen. It was essentially deep fried in lard or Crisco and one time I was eating a lot of it (as ever) and she kept asking if I was done and it seemed like it was a compliment for me to keep saying “No make more” and then my dad got mad at me later for making Grandma stand and cook all morning. I still think she was happy to do it.

Grandma’s house was a mystical thing to me as a kid and I suppose it still is. It was a medium-size white nineteenth-century farm house that seemed almost clotted with layers of history that you could taste in the air if you smacked your lips just right. In retrospect though that was probably just decades of constant cigarette smoke. The house held the myths of my mom’s childhood and the spirit of a grandfather I never met but it also embraced a darkness that was permanently just out of sight. Its history felt alternately foreboding and joyous even as the house itself was always overtly loving. It had a screen door whose creak-and-whine I still hear and its interior was a hodgepodge of renovations and additions spanning six decades. There was only one shower in the house. It was in the aforementioned basement and was installed for men coming in from the fields to clean up before coming upstairs. It was literally a cracked concrete closet with one of those drains that seems like it might swallow you. I always took a bath instead in the upstairs bathroom. The water there would get so hot it could scald you and it had a view of the backyard and the shelterbelt trees and the endless wheat fields beyond. I loved that view.

Charlotte worked hard, loved hard, and took tremendous pride in her home in which she was often alone. The house was always spotless and in immaculate repair. She was a small woman—no more than 5’5” and usually thin as a rail despite eating several metric tons of butter on most mornings—and she used an enormous riding lawn mower to mow her yard at least once a week, and some weeks twice. It took her most of an entire day. She had a 2-acre “yard” that was more of a field covered in sporadically placed trees. It began life as a stereotypical farm yard, with a massive white barn several grain silos an enormous garden a corrugated metal garage and a large gasoline storage tank. By the time I have a memory, the barn was derelict. It was demolished when I was in elementary school. Some of my happiest memories are of playing with my cousins in that yard lighting fireworks climbing abandoned farm equipment and playing on the tire swing.

A few weeks ago my mom called me to tell me Grandma had tested positive for Covid-19. She lived in a retirement home in an anti-mask state that decided the prolonged needless deaths of thousands of its own citizens—each one a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a friend—were a small thing to lay on the altar of fetishized individualism and uncaring, un-Christian political expediency. My mom assumed the worst was on the horizon. I knew that was probably so but I told her not to bury Grandma prematurely. Most people recover from the virus. But Charlotte’s age and history of constant cigarette use made her prognosis poor. She was lucky enough to have a hospital bed and nurses and doctors and staff who worked—indeed risked their lives and the lives of their own loved ones—to keep at bay the physical pain that must have followed her for most of her life. But they could of course do nothing for psychological pain. They could do nothing to allow her own children visit her in the hospital. They could do nothing, really. And Grandma must have been so tired.

I haven’t seen my grandma since my wedding in 2006. After I started college in 2001 I slowly lost touch with most of my mom’s family in North Dakota. At first we still exchanged cards and talked now and again on the phone. But that faded as well. I just never made the effort. I am sorry for it. But for so long I’ve felt spread so thin. I started my own family and moved from Seattle to Houston to Washington D.C. and then to California and all the while I was spread too thin. And with Grandma so far away in a place difficult to reach I just never made the effort.

My mom texted me the evening Grandma died to say she was gone. I had been prepared so the actuality of it didn’t have much of a feeling at first. I went to bed intending to go to work in the morning and I did. But once I got to work the anger and the sadness and the guilt began seeping in at my seams and the more my brain crawled into the deep corners I had not visited in so long the more the leak became a driving flood. Still I was not able to cry. I wish I could cry.

I don’t really know how to handle grief. I’ve been fortunate not to have lost many people in my life but from what I have experienced I’m clearly shit at grief. Mostly it makes me angry which seems like the right emotion at first but at some point it’s supposed to give way to something else. I don’t handle sympathy or condolences well either. I don’t like to feel like I’m at the center of someone else’s thoughts. When people offer me their condolences I feel embarrassed to have impugned on their life. I don’t even really feel thankful only the guilt of having compelled someone to feel concern for me. This happens with strangers as well as those closest to me.

I’m watching my grandma’s funeral mass on a cracked iPhone in a car in the parking lot of the cabinet shop where I work. It’s my lunch break. It’s surreal. Because of COVID I could not go to North Dakota, as I surely would have done in the Before Times. I want to cry but again I just feel angry. At first the sight of the funeral made me ruefully chuckle. I mean, I’m watching a funeral mass in a Catholic church I remember attending often as a kid and even though it’s on a phone screen I feel the same tedium washing over me as I ever have with church except this time it is tinctured by more guilt for feeling it. I immediately want to be anywhere else except, bizarrely, I am. From the camera’s vantage toward the back of the rows of pews I am here staring at my Uncle Dan’s old bald spot as I probably would do if I really was there and for a second it is warmly familiar. But then I also see my cousins’ new bald spots and I think about my own bald spot (which let’s be honest is neither a “spot” nor new at this point) and all the other mundane oddities that bob to the top of your barely-conscious mind when you’re bored at a solemn event while someone who barely knew your loved one prattles on about things that neither comfort nor conjure the images that might celebrate Grandma’s life or find peace in her memory. Catholic mass is often billed as a celebration but really it’s a formality. Something that exists only to be finished with so that everyone can get on with the business of actually celebrating the deceased and finding love and levity and common solace with each other.

Mostly I am angry I won’t get to experience the part after mass where we celebrate Grandma. I’m angry that this pandemic and the people who had the power to help mitigate it have stolen that from me. I am angrier that they have stolen it from my mother whose last parent is now gone. She should be there. I should be there. I should bear the discomfort of being around all my family who I love but who I no longer really know and who no longer really know me. I want to listen to them reminisce about a tough-as-nails woman who I also haven’t known for a long time and perhaps never did know very well. I am jealous of their memories and frustrated I don’t share enough of them.

I do miss her. I miss her courage and fortitude. I miss her easy cigarette-chaffed laugh and I miss her smoking in her recliner while watching the evening news. I miss her ruling over the kitchen while brandishing her spatula and “UFF-DAH” and “Oh for sick” and I miss the farm and the house and the garage and the barn. I miss the 4th of July fireworks and the frigid Christmas snows. I miss the steep stairs and the haunted basement and the cloud of smoke around the kitchen table while everyone laughed, fought, argued, and laughed again until late into the evening. I miss all that and so much more. I miss my aunts and uncles and cousins to whom I once felt close. They all have families of their own now. I don’t know any of them. I love them all. And I am so, so sorry, Grandma, that you may not have known that I love you.