My grandmother’s nursing home room looks very much like a prison cell in disguise. It is artificially cheery and homey, but smells like disinfectant and despair. Or, maybe I’m just seeing it through her eyes. It really isn’t so much the room as the body that occupies it, sprawled on the bed she can no longer leave unaided and without great difficulty, caving in around the light that still burns so brightly in her intelligent, perpetually suspicious eyes. My mother puts on the smile she only wears for her mother, half tolerant and long-suffering adult, half wounded child. My husband’s smile is genuine. He likes Grandma and she likes him. My best quality, according to Grandma, is that I married a tall, dark, handsome (and friendly) Ph.D. Grandma enjoys the company of cerebral people, which makes it especially odd that, of my four siblings, I am the only one she doesn’t treat with disdain. Both my mother and me and far more emotionally intelligent than “smart,” and Grandma’s a psychologist who never practiced but clings to her doctorate like it’s the only real thing she’s ever processed. I briefly wonder what my smile looks like. I both admire and resent this complicated woman, whose DNA and inherited trauma I cannot exfoliate from my body and brain. Standing here, with three of the most directly and indirectly influential people in my life, I wonder if family love feels this convoluted for everyone or if mine is just special.
I haven’t seen my grandmother for about three years, although I spoke to her on the phone twice: once to tell her about my sister’s cancer diagnosis, and once after Rose died. She looks so much older, even frail. Frailty is not something I can associate with the incorrigibly rebellious teenager who threatened to sue my mother after she busted her butt moving Grandma out of the ancient, moldy trailer she called home and into an assisted living facility closer to my parents’ house. Grandma forgot that she had agreed to the move, decided the staff were plotting to murder her, called a taxi to take her back to her mostly empty trailer, and hired a lawyer to press charges for “elder abuse.” It didn’t seem quite safe to talk to her after that, so I didn’t. Even if I had wanted to visit my dad advised against it because the neighborhood had deteriorated in the years since I had gotten married and moved away. At the time she lived outside of Steubenville, Ohio, a dying steel mill city that has been mostly claimed by the gangs that moved in back when it was a prosperous center for illegal gambling and prostitution. After witnessing a drug sale outside my grandma’s trailer my mom told me not to visit unless Grandma was in the hospital, where it was safe to walk around after dark and even bring my girls. To my grandma, that crumbling tin box in the seedy lot represented freedom, and by God she wasn’t going to have that taken from her. Eventually the trailer park evicted her and she ended up in a much less nice nursing home than the one my mother had found for her, one that was still two hours away from all of us, but at least my mom hadn’t had anything to do with it. Her freedom hadn’t been taken from her, she had just sort of lost it. The distinction seemed important.
There is a force to my grandma even now. She is a woman who took up all the space she wanted to in an age when women were not expected, or allowed, to be anything but small and quiet. The daughter of a sex-obsessed, abusive, Seventh-Day Adventist pastor and a painkiller addict who spent most of her life in bed, my grandmother grew up angry, but with an entire hymnal’s worth of piano music memorized from her years of playing “good pastor’s kid.” When her husband cheated on her while she was pregnant with their second child, my mother, she dumped his ass and let herself go as wild as she wanted to. Drugs, alcohol, homosexuality and gender dysphoria that resulted in her becoming a trans man when my mother was still very young were, to my grandmother, all part of the same unhealthy, runaway lifestyle. She achieved some notoriety when she changed back into a woman and wrote a book about her experiences. I haven’t yet read her book but I did read an old interview she gave, complete with pictures of my mother, aunt and uncle, and her as a woman and a man. I must say it makes me smile to know she was homosexual and non-gender-conforming back before those concepts were even part of the greater cultural consciousness. “It’s kind of a blessing now,” my mother will half whisper to me as we are leaving. “Her birth certificate still lists her as ‘male,’ it was never changed back. So she gets a room to herself here because the nursing home staff don’t know whether to room her with a man or a woman!” It says a lot that this is hardly an unusual conversation to be having about my grandmother.
The connections she made during her book promotion served her well years later when my uncle (a later addition to the family who died when my mother was in college) was diagnosed with kidney disease and included—without his mother’s consent—in a medical trial. When it became clear that the treatment was killing him she tried to move her teenage son to another hospital, or at least find a different doctor to treat him, but the research doctor would not release him and threatened her with legal action if she continued to “interfere” in her son’s care. So she snuck him out of the hospital and fled to the Mayo clinic in Mexico just ahead of a warrant for her arrest. She laughs while telling us about losing a tail before crossing the border. She knew she was being followed so she pulled into a driveway, cut the engine and the lights and told her son to duck. They crouched in the car while the men following them cruised back and forth, confused, then finally left. They spent months across the border, listening to a San Diego radio station and wondering if they would ever be able to return. My mom recalls seeing men following her, too, probably hoping that she would lead them to her mother. It sounds like fiction, right? I shake my head and, behind me, my husband says, “wow.” How many families have stories like this? I love this Grandma: the badass queer with her badass, hair-raising tales of defiance and bohemian badassery. My mother and I both relax, our smiles easing into genuine. My grandmother is many different people, and you can never be quite sure who you’ll get. It is only after we have left, our relief at having made it through without much drama evident in our slumping shoulders and loose faces, that I begin to realize what each of these aspects of her personality has taught me over the years.
Never let anyone clip your wings. Not your parents. Not your husband. Not even your kids.
Conforming to expectations is for people who are afraid to be themselves. You do you, and anyone who doesn’t like it can kiss your queenly butt.
There are always consequences to living your own life despite everybody else in it, and sometimes the people you love will be hurt. Regret is not something you can choose to live without, but you can choose not to dwell on it.
Irreverence is essential to surviving a childhood spent fearing God and all authority.
Revel in your accomplishments. Be proud of yourself. You’ve earned it.
It’s OK to hide behind your armor if you’re feeling afraid or out of control. You only have to be your authentic self around the people you are most comfortable with. That doesn’t necessarily include family.
Live loud, even if that means utilizing primal scream therapy while stuck in traffic with your kids in the car (they can always get their own therapists when they’re older).
Life is unpredictable. Take that as a challenge.
This weekend we’re going to visit Grandma again, this time at a different nursing home (a typically dramatic story that I’ll leave to my readers’ imaginations for now) and under hospice care. I cannot reconcile the concept of Grandma with the concept of dying. Unconsciously, I begin tracing my collarbones. When I was sixteen Grandma gave me a pearl necklace from a company called Grandma’s Pearls of Wisdom. That, and driving me into Pittsburgh to buy mini quiches at Costco for my party, were pretty much the only grandmotherly things she ever did (other than the occasional birthday card). I didn’t pay much mind to the company generated note included with the necklace, it was saccharine and didn’t sound anything like her. She wasn’t much for taking advice, so she rarely gave it, either. I told her I would wear those pearls on my wedding day, and I did. Maybe I’ll wear them when we visit. I think she would like that. The real pearls, though, are those I’ve gleaned from watching and listening, and trying to use my adult brain to filter out the good from the harmful. In preparing myself to say goodbye I don’t want to either demonize or canonize her, she deserves more honesty than that. All people are complex, my grandma more than most. She spent her entire life fighting, and so it is fitting that I should struggle with how to find closure amid the tangled threads that tie us together.
Family, to Grandma, is a set of roles and expectations she was never well suited to personify. Daughter. Sister. Wife. Mother. I don’t think she could look at any of us, especially her daughters, without seeing the scrolling list of ways she had failed to be the mother they wanted. Maybe she loves me because I’m easier, because she never failed me the way she did my mom. Maybe if my aunt had had a daughter she would have loved that granddaughter too. Maybe I remind her a bit of herself in some way. She’s the psychologist, and I’m not sure even she understands her reasons, but I’m glad that I have been someone who can bring out her best more often than not. To me, she is more than a cautionary tale. She’s also an inspiration. One that comes with reams of fine print and warnings surrounded by bright red borders, but an inspiration nonetheless. I’ll take it. And maybe there is something I can give back, my own necklace of wisdom, as it were. I hope I can find a way to let her know that I see her, that she can stop running now, that she belongs. What good is blood relation if, when it really counts, we can’t find a way to weave the ties that bind into something that is chaotically beautiful?
To the abused girl, who never knew serenity, I wish peace.
To the child who split her psyche into pieces in order to hide the many parts of herself that were not acceptable to her parents, I wish wholeness.
To the adolescent who swore to herself that she would never again be made to feel powerless, I wish empowerment.
To the teenager who daily bruised her mind against the bars of fear and helplessness, I wish freedom.
To the young woman who dared to believe in love only to see her dreams and self-worth shattered, I wish hope.
To the abandoned mother who was never mothered and never thought she would be raising children alone, I wish nurturance.
To the woman who would do anything to find herself except become still and look inside, I wish tranquility.
To the struggling mother who thought she could be redeemed through a Herculean effort of sacrifice, endurance, and determination, only to lose her son anyway, I wish healing.
To the addict who fought her way through a doctorate program, psychology another avenue to redemption, then never used her knowledge to heal another, I wish self-acceptance.
To the aging woman who could not forgive her body for failing her, but fed her old cat better than she did herself, I wish self-care.
To she who could still be mother enough to fight for her daughter’s best care in an oncology ward, I wish pride.
To the grandmother who gifted a necklace because she could not bring back all the things her daughters had lost because of her, I wish self-forgiveness.
To the lonely old lady who believed that she deserved better in life, I wish the ability to let go and Be.
To the child who still wants to be loved and protected, I wish security.
To the girl who could never stop believing that God delights in punishing her, I wish Love.
To the body who ran all across the country looking for a place to feel accepted, I wish belonging.
To the mind who never believed she was trustworthy, I wish Knowing.
To the spirit that has faithfully carried her shadow and her light and allowed both to be seen and known, I wish fulfillment.
And to the soul that has never stopped fighting to be worthy of her space in the world, I wish lightness and delight.
What better can I give than what I would wish for myself?
May it be.