Tribute to my Grandmother

My Grandmother died over the weekend and I wrote this in tribute to her.

Grandmothers are the people who bake cookies and buy you things in gift shops and slip you five dollar bills when they see you.

So, it only makes sense that my first memory of my Grandma Betty was when she was shrieking that I ruined her life because I told a process server that she was hiding in the closet.

I was four then. I didn't understand that she had come to Florida not to visit her new grandchild,my baby brother, or to see me. She was running from the dissolution of her second (or was it third) marriage and had the belief that if she could just keep from getting those papers, it would mean that the whole thing wasn't happening. I'm 33 now and I still don't really understand her motives. Especially after I learned in law school that service by mail is just as effective as in person. But the feeling of hiding in a closet and hoping that the problems will just go away instead of find you...that's an emotion that I am quite familiar with.

I can't say that I really knew my grandmother. I knew the stories about her. About how when my Mom was 16 years old the child my grandmother had given birth to when she was a teenager and hadn't raised showed up and instantly there as this hereunto unknown half-brother. There was the story about how Grandma Betty managed to get a DUI when she didn't even have a driver's license after the guy giving her a ride to her AA meeting took her out drinking and said he was too smashed to drive. The time she ran off with the husband of the family next door creating a scandal that never left the neighborhood (she married that man, the one who she was trying to avoid divorcing by hiding in our closet, and after that divorce she married him again a few years later). I can tell the stories about her, stories she would tell herself with the self-deprecating charm that all addicts have, but I can't tell you why she did those things. Or what she was feeling. Or if she regretted any of them.

Her generation was one where women didn't talk about their regrets or faded dream because they didn't have any aspiration other than marriage and children. Grandma Betty had those things. Many times over (three marriages and five children) but she wasn't happy. Even in the posed family photos, the staged shots where everyone is told to say cheese, she seems distant. Her eyes are dim and her mouth is tight. It's the same expression in the candid shots of her. Lovely but distant. Sad and fragile in a way that make is alluring to a certain type of man looking to be the hero to someone. Or two. Or three.

I didn't get much of my looks from that side of the family, unfortunately, but I did get my depression and anxiety disorder. So,I have a bit of understanding of what those looks are in the photos. Of what if feels like to think that you can avoid a problem by fleeing the state and hiding in a closet. Or that running off with some guy will finally make you happy. Or convincing yourself that stopping for a drink on the way to an AA meeting is a good idea. Living with a mental illness is like watching a foreign film with a malicious translator. Your being told the exact opposite of what is really happening even as your other senses are trying to correct things. It's an exhausting constant battle inside your head between what is real and what isn't. Millions of years of evolution have trained your brain to respond instinctively to the brain chemicals being released haphazardly in your body just as your rational mind is trying to piece together the logical response.

The art of psychology is far from perfect, and I could tell stories about my various adventures with the system, but at least these days they understand that mental illness is a real problem with real solutions. And so my nervous breakdown had therapists and exercises and self-reflection to help me deal with them. Grandma Betty's generation was simply told to stop complaining and pretend that everything was fine. Have another baby to fill the emptiness. Have a drink to settle your nerves. Later on came the perscriptions pills and the hospitalization and, eventually, the electroshock therapy. All because she wasn't happy with her life. A life that she didn't really choose except by being born a woman in that time and place.

We had glimpses. When she was playing cards, or telling totally inappropriate jokes to her grandchildren, you could see the spark in her eyes missing from those pictures. When she was watching movies you could see it in her face, a joy from seeing the stories of other people that she could never have for her own story. She favored the classics: Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, but she also liked the scandalous soapy spectacles like Peyton's Place and Valley of the Dolls. Even modern movies made her happy, she laughed hilariously at the raunchy antics of American Pie.

Movies are the one thing that she passed down to her children and grandchildren. We would go over to her house and pile in her big bed and raid the Blockbuster for a mix of new releases and old classics. We'd watch them all. There wasn't much discussion during or after, except the occasional argument over who should have gotten the girl in the love triangle. She was never happier than watching movies with her family. And I'm pretty sure that we didn't go over for the movies as much as for the chance to see her, happy for those brief hours and smiling and present. We all still love movies (her grandson, PJ, is about to enter film school and her daughters go together to see a new movie almost every week) and I can't help but think that some of that love is from the fact that we associate them with her happiness.

Towards the end of her life she suffered from Alzheimer's disease. At the end she didn't know who any of us were (she kept telling my brother Adam that he was ugly, so clearly she still had taste) but she did remember the words to the song they sang in Bringing Up Baby. It's tragic to see someone lose their memories. To forget the things that made them who they were. And yet there was a time, early in her diagnosis, when something amazing happened. The depression and anxiety went away from her. The detachment in her eyes was replaced by a strange awe. She told us all we were beautiful and lovely. She'd make jokes and laugh at them. The woman who I remember screaming at me was replaced by the huggy, silly, Grandma that kids always want to have. But it took the loss of her memories for that to happen. The things that happened to her in her life, things that must have haunted her for years, were forgotten. As they disappeared the woman who was underneath came through. A woman who loved everyone, especially her family and her movies. The happiness that she hadn't found through drugs or booze or marriage or motherhood came when she forgot her past. 

I'll remember all the stories, of course, but I'll also remember the joyous person she became at the beginning of the end. The person who was hidden away for so long. I'm not saying that she would have been a happy person if she had been able to complete school past the 8th grade, or get a career, or live the life of a independent woman. I don't know. And that's sort of the thing that hurts so much. We won't ever really know who Grandma Betty would have been in a world where she'd been able to become her own person. The grief we feel for her is a strange sort of hybrid- sad that we are losing her but also sadness that we never really had her in the first place.

So, how do you celebrate the life of the person who never really had a chance to be herself? Tears and flowers? No. Instead I suggest a commitment to live a life of joy and authenticity. To appreciate the freedom we have to choose the path that our lives will take. To know that the things that we say define us, the memories and the pain, are not permanent fixtures. We can strip those memories away and still find the person underneath. You can't run and hide from the bad things in life (because some bitch grand kid will give you away). But even when the worst thing happens, you may end up remarrying the guy in a few years.

And a movie.

Definitely a movie.