Blank
spaces often scare us more than pain. This is why death is so daunting: because
our void of knowledge about it is a blank space. The possibilities are
infinite, and infinity stretches out past the horizon of our understanding,
spinning with so many colors that they all blur into white. This is why many
prefer suffering to nothingness; because at least there's still a self to
suffer.
When I think of my grandma, who doesn't have much time left, I wonder how much of her memory is buried under snow and how much has been uprooted altogether. Maybe it's like a page where the writing has been erased and she's trying to piece it back together by the ghostly traces. Her page was the first edition, but she's read it to so many people that it's no longer the only copy. The words have scattered from her page onto those of everyone she has loved.
The words aren't lost. Her family still knows her Yiddish and her made-up expressions like "cuckoopots" (meaning anything outrageous). We still know her winking innuendos and her puns; how sitting on a menu is "ass-essing" it. We know her spirited rants against bigotry, anti-Semitism, and bad customer service. We know her stories about how much she loved her students. We know the time the stock market crashed, her elementary school burned down, she caught the measles, and her widowed father remarried all within the same year. How she lay in bed as a sick five-year-old that year, clutching a little toy fire truck, and said to the ceiling, "Mommy, please make me better." How on the day WWII ended, she went to a party in a yellow dress and re-met my grandpa (they'd gone to school together, reconnected at the party, and started dating). How her first boyfriend had been gay, and she grew to care about gay rights before a lot of people did. How she had six children because she wanted one for every millionth Jew killed in the Holocaust.
We remember these things because she told us. Because her life has been a love letter to the world. Or sometimes a complaint letter. Or a bawdy, hilarious manifesto.
One moment a few weeks ago, in a fragment amid a word salad, she said "I want to be everywhere." And she is everywhere, just not in herself.
She has begun her own one-woman diaspora. She has found homes in everyone else.
When I think of my grandma, who doesn't have much time left, I wonder how much of her memory is buried under snow and how much has been uprooted altogether. Maybe it's like a page where the writing has been erased and she's trying to piece it back together by the ghostly traces. Her page was the first edition, but she's read it to so many people that it's no longer the only copy. The words have scattered from her page onto those of everyone she has loved.
The words aren't lost. Her family still knows her Yiddish and her made-up expressions like "cuckoopots" (meaning anything outrageous). We still know her winking innuendos and her puns; how sitting on a menu is "ass-essing" it. We know her spirited rants against bigotry, anti-Semitism, and bad customer service. We know her stories about how much she loved her students. We know the time the stock market crashed, her elementary school burned down, she caught the measles, and her widowed father remarried all within the same year. How she lay in bed as a sick five-year-old that year, clutching a little toy fire truck, and said to the ceiling, "Mommy, please make me better." How on the day WWII ended, she went to a party in a yellow dress and re-met my grandpa (they'd gone to school together, reconnected at the party, and started dating). How her first boyfriend had been gay, and she grew to care about gay rights before a lot of people did. How she had six children because she wanted one for every millionth Jew killed in the Holocaust.
We remember these things because she told us. Because her life has been a love letter to the world. Or sometimes a complaint letter. Or a bawdy, hilarious manifesto.
One moment a few weeks ago, in a fragment amid a word salad, she said "I want to be everywhere." And she is everywhere, just not in herself.
She has begun her own one-woman diaspora. She has found homes in everyone else.
