The Way Home (2002)

From The Grey City Journal, September 1991:

I was lying on my sleeping bag in the room of my new empty apartment in San Diego and the phone woke me. "Grandma died," mom said and the tears immediately started to choke me, and I didn't say anything. "Try not to feel too bad about it."
"When?" I asked, and "What happened?" I didn't want to cry I just wanted to know what happened. "When you told me she went to the hospital I didn't think it was serious."
"Well I didn't either—I talked to her last night and she said she was feeling a little better."
"What happened?"
"I'm not sure—she was sick. There's nothing I can do about it now."
"I know that, I just want to know what happened."

The fact that my financial aid was late and after two weeks of effort I still had not found a roommate for my 885$ a month apartment—financial worries beyond anything before in my life—these melted. The enormous shock of grandma's death brought intense reflection on my tears. As much as I might have wanted to think how lucky grandma was to live in an expensive care facility and how her death at age 85 is insignificant in the face of the world's suffering, I can only escape my past so much. Though I have overturned political and cultural conservatism, more subtle traits have left their imprint. My tears were the same tears that would creep into grandma's eyes each time my mother and I left her. I can remember even as a small child seeing grandma's grand eyes turn red with tears as we began to leave.

Grandma worried a lot: it would not be incorrect to say she worried herself to death. She worried about her sisters, her daughters, her grandchildren. Her letters to me were wonderful: she had a great deal of trouble writing with her arthritis so they were usually very short with a few sentences of concern and advice, and she always enclosed a few "Family Circus" comic strips which she clipped from the newspaper. My trip to Europe worried grandma a great deal as she sent me letters warning me to be careful, for "the world is a dangerous place." When I told her I hoped to meet some French friends in order to improve my French, she wrote me--as if worried I might forget how to speak English--that I should meet some Americans.

It should be noted that my grandmother was the oldest of three daughters and remembers her mother taking part in rallies for women's suffrage, as she said, "People just knew it was right." Outside of the great amount of work done for her church—my grandfather was a pastor—the most distinguishing accomplishment of my grandmother was the transcribing of her great grandfathers letters sent back to his family in Michigan as he pursued gold in California. Now part of the University of Michigan archives, grandma spent perhaps half her life reading the difficult script and converting it into some 500 typewritten pages. Interestingly, grandma once told me her grandmother had also kept a diary that filled many volumes, but it had been discarded by the family.

When I was in Chicago for the summer I tried to uncover my roots there. Grandma studied religious education and met my grandfather at Northwestern. When I asked her over the phone about it she insisted it had been such a while she knew nothing of Chicago nowadays. I tried to make clear that I was interested in her recollections of when she had lived there. "Oh Paul," she said, "There's the Science Museum of course, and oh there's so much to see but you know I've been gone for such a long while I couldn't tell you. Well you know there's the Jane Addams Hull House and the Chicago Temple Building—,"she changed to a serious tone, "there's a great lot of things you must see now Paul."

I had talked to Grandma the week before she died to tell her I had arrived safely in San Diego and was settling in. She had been worried about me. "You don't have to worry about me," I told her.

I gave her my phone number and we repeated it three times back to each other. Then she said, "I don't know if I can call you I have trouble with the time difference and all."
"You can call me anytime grandma."
"Oh I can," I heard her smile.
"I love you grandma."
"I love you too Paul."
"I'll talk to you soon."
"Goodbye."

When thinking on the liveliness she had in her voice up to her last days it is hard to imagine her gone. There could be no sweeter or gentler a grandmother.
I miss Chicago. I'm going to miss grandma.