Grandma

I’m nursing Reid, burping him between sides, when I think of her. Something about the smell of the Baby Vicks I put on Reid’s chest before his nap reminds me of the Icy Hot she used, and smelled like, constantly. Beside me sits a dresser my mom brought me from her house. I have to admit I didn’t think of her much the day my parents brought me the dresser.

She was a difficult woman, my grandma. I won’t speak ill of the dead, but I think she’d agree with me that she was difficult. Maybe complicated is a better word. Wounded. In a great deal of physical and emotional pain. 

But she was also generous to a fault. She contributed greatly to my college fund and paid for all of my textbooks. She took me to Ireland once. She bought me clothes and shoes and once, a pair of boots so beautiful I looked at them more than I wore them. She even insisted on reimbursing me—a grown woman with a mortgage and two children—for my flight and rental car the last time I went to see her. 

I didn’t know how to connect with her as a child, a teenager, or a young adult. I didn’t understand how the cycles of her pain affected her mood, and, frankly, I was too busy thinking about myself to bother connecting with a woman in her 80s. 

So the time between visits grew and grew, until, when she died, it had been several years since I’d seen her. 

I don’t have many memories of the house she lived in when she died. I can’t remember where the dresser beside me—Reid’s dresser now—sat in that house. I don’t remember where it was in her old house either, though I have many more memories there. 

If I close my eyes I can smell the basement in that house, and see the funny little shower she had installed in the hot water heater closet. I can picture the VHS rewinder that lived on the shelf at the bottom of the stairs that always had ant poison on the second step from the bottom. I can feel the rough edges of the lace doilies that covered the arms of all her living room furniture and hear the clock that sat on her mantle.  

But I don’t remember—can’t picture—the dresser.

There’s an alternate universe where I can call her and ask her where it was. Where she apologized for things she said and I forgave her. Where I can ask her about four-year-old girls and raising daughters and what it was like to see the world change so much in the span of her lifetime. 

Where I can ask her all the things I never got the chance to. 

She would love Reid. She would laugh and laugh at his chubby cheeks and easy grin and dramatic scowl. She would pinch his thick thighs and read him a book and give each character their own voice, the way she did when she was a librarian. 

But she didn’t get the chance to meet him. 

So I sit here, rocking the only one of my children she didn’t meet, beside a dresser I can’t remember being hers, and think of her. 

And wish it had been different.