Tea with Grandma

It came in the mail yesterday.

I didn't know to expect it, because I didn't know it existed. This token of my childhood lost in the chaos of teenhood found its magical way back to me, like the key to a secret garden of memory.

And it completely wrecked me.

It is a card. The front features a simplistic drawing of a small room with a table and wicker chairs and an open door and a closed window. There is a vast but undetailed landscape beyond the glass. A teapot and cups are arranged on the tabletop for a party for two.

Based on the date stamped on the right corner, she sent it to me when I was four. She first thanks me for sharing my bed when she visited last. Then she moves into fantasy. Beautiful imaginative, she asks me if I want to join her at the table for a "tea (or koolaid) party," whether I would prefer the chair by the open door or the chair by the closed window. She asks me what kind of cookies I would like, what we should talk about.

And nearly twenty years later, in a kitchen she had never seen with a fiance she hadn't met, I could hear her voice asking me to join her and began crying inconsolably.

This wonderful woman died when I was eleven.

She was my father's mother, my Grandma. She was strong and independent and creative and so unbelievably encouraging of my various artistic endeavors. She stole moments from my tumultuous childhood and filled them with magic, with Pollyanna and Heidi and antique shows and finger-painting. She read every story I wrote, told my I was beautiful, taught me to embrace being a black sheep among my classmates. When I was ten, I was in her second wedding, and when we moved to Germany, she was the one I had the most difficult time saying goodbye to.

She wasn't sick for very long, but I guess that's selfish of me to say. To her, I am sure it was an eternity, waiting for the next system or organ to shut down, for the next tube or wire or oxygen mask. Waiting for the day when she couldn't speak, couldn't think anymore. She never let me know of her pain -- when I was with her, she smiled and asked about school and boys and my writing, which she continued to read as long as she was able.

ALS was the subject of many school papers, many presentations, because I needed to understand what was happening to her. I needed to understand why and how she was being taken from me before my high school graduation, before my wedding, before my children were born, before my first novel was published.

A week before my twelfth birthday, she was gone.

I don't talk about her very often. The memory of her loss isn't so much a memory as an open wound, something I am reminded of several times a week (especially as I plan my wedding and prepare my novel under deadline). It's the one pain I am not capable of expressing without my bones breaking down, without coming unhinged, and no one likes coming unhinged as often as I feel like I could. That said, I try to remember everything I can about her, clinging to those moments with her like a life vest, so when something of hers mysteriously and suddenly returns to me that I am unprepared for -- well, you can imagine the unhinging.

My poor cat. I was holding him when my fiance handed me the card.

Maybe I will share tea with her this morning. I'll take the seat by the window so she can enjoy the sun, and I'll tell her of my fiance and my cats and my book deal. I'll confess how much I dislike graduate school, how much I love my job at the library, how much I miss her. And I will cry, but I will smile, too.

And maybe the gash on my heart will heal, just a little bit.