Grandma Beck

My grandmother died about an hour ago.

My grandmother is the one who helped steer me onto the path I’ve taken in life, when she gave me a radio drama presentation of ‘The Hobbit’ on my seventh birthday. This is what made me become the great honking geek I am today, and also meant that I would never date a girl until I was eighteen. Had she not given this to me, I may have perhaps gone on to be normal, perhaps even popular, at school.

Of course, I would also have been infinitely dumber.

I’ve told this little story to a lot of people, but like most stories, it’s just a short hand way of summarizing a complex and unwieldy string of memories, filled with so many details it would be impossible to take them out of your head in their entirety and make them sensible for others. It captures every encouragement she gave me, and every book she gave me, gently prodding me along the Right and True path.

I don’t really regret not finishing school anymore. I regret that I don’t have a degree that gets me paid oodles of money, but from what I hear, that’s a myth anyway. But I do regret the sound of my grandmother’s voice when I told her I’d been kicked out of school over the phone. I usually claim that I have no regrets, and that you should never regret anything, because that’s a terrible way to go through life. But this is the one I can’t dodge.

I went to Minnesota and then to Europe to make up for my lack of formal education. I went for a lot of reasons, but I’ll put the psychological desire down to a desire to erase that sound of regret.

(Yes, I know, you’re thinking, “Minnesota?”, but really it was a very educational time in my life.)

Then again, I was so far away, I never got to see my grandmother. Or really, any of my family, since they all live in Washington State. And it was painful, because as my grandmother was declining, I saw it in drastic, yearly increments. And, coward that I am, I tended to avoid it. It’s hard to see someone so vital and loved so reduced in stature.

I showed her pictures of my trips in Europe a few days before she ceased to be lucid at all. I felt better about it, but that’s what moments like these are all about: making us feel better. I don’t know what it was for her. I hope it made up for my past fuck ups. I hope it made her proud of me again. The next time I saw her she didn’t recognize me and thought I was just some nice young gentleman who was helping her with her popcorn while she watched Shirley Temple in ‘Heidi’.

But most likely, she was always proud of me. Disappointed, yes, but she was truly the sweetest of us. I think she wouldn’t have been able to not feel happy with me and my life. Certainly all outward signs would say so. She knew I still read voluminously, and that I was engaged and curious about the world. And as far as I could tell from anything she said to me, she was happy for me.

And that is all we have in life, those surface details from which we have to divine the inner feelings of others.

I’m writing this down because it’s the only way to remember. To try to pluck whatever fragments of memory can be saved from the tangled webs in our head and put them somewhere we can reclaim them should they ever get lost in our own minds. I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t expect to have some sort of tearful reunion with her, bathed in the light of whatever higher power there might be. She’s dead, she’s gone, and I will never see her again.

But I’m writing this to leave a marker, a place to go back to when I find it impossible to navigate my own brain, a map to follow to lovely memories of watching the Disney Channel at her house, of the clothes she made me (the lovely blue corduroy outfit I wore until I just couldn’t fit into the damn thing anymore), of the time when she wrote my report on Virginia in sixth grade for me, because I was a terrible little child. Of every hug, encouragement, and laugh I ever heard from her. This is the treasure map of my brain.