My grandmother was the most graceful woman alive. She looked delicate and pristine, being five nine and very thin, but her personality and charm made her seem much larger. When my older cousin, Tess, was first learning to speak, she couldn’t say “Grand-mère,” the french word for grandmother, so she simply said, “Mamère.” The name stuck and to all six of us grandchildren, she was known as Mamère. To the adults, she was Rory. Even her name was graceful, Josephine Aurore Cadden Vaeth. She had sky blue-gray eyes and beautiful chestnut hair, even into her seventies, that was always curled at the bottom, skimming her shoulders. She wore her hair like this every day that I can remember her. Her husband, my grandfather, was known as Grand-père and he died of leukemia four years before she did. She was a nurse and, although I didn’t know it in the end, a breast cancer survivor for twenty six years.
My grandmother’s house was giant. It sat on the way up of Mount Tamalpais and had a sprawling garden in the front, leading to the front door with slanted glass and a backyard that consisted of a thick forest including a creek with a footbridge. The house itself was cavernous. Whenever my cousins came to visit we would play hide and seek in the numerous rooms and explore through the secret doors that led to attics, closets, and crawl spaces. Every game was eventually given up due to the fact that we could never find each other.
When I was five, we rebuilt our little 50s model home into a double story house. For my year in Kindergarten I lived in Mamère’s house with my parents and little brother. The living quarters were downstairs and my parents slept in my mom’s old room, which was white with accents of blue and gray, like Mamère’s eyes, while my brother slept in my mother’s youngest sister’s room. Down the hall, past the ironing station and the bathroom, lay Mamère’s room and then mine.
Since Mamère’s house opened to the upstairs, the downstairs was partly inside the mountain. The window in my room, high up, almost touching the ceiling, led out to ground level. My room, so close to the outside and next to a crawl space, was always filled with spiders. They were everywhere I looked: crawling in my bed, on the ceiling, in the corners, on my dark wood furniture, and in my shoes. To say I was afraid of spiders would be man’s greatest understatement. Whenever I saw a spider, or in a sleepy haze, imagined one dangling from the ceiling, dancing on my pillow, my little feet padded over to Mamère’s room. She was never angry that I woke her up and I slept in her bed, on my late grandfather’s side, safe and far from the harm of spiders.
Mamère’s room was beautiful. It had a hardwood light brown floor from door to fireplace. She had large stained glass windows wherever sunlight would reach them and a glass door that opened out to a balcony with sunburnt-pink tiles. When the sunlight leaked into the room through the colored windows and open doors, I imagined the fairies that Mamère told me about dancing in the air, drinking in the sunlight. I was always in Mamère’s room, looking through her jewelry, trying on her makeup, rolling around on the floor, and playing my first computer game on the new computer.
One month, in the many that I stayed at her house, I developed a new and frightening strain of Strep. Instead of having a sore throat, I had large boils and blisters all over my body that hurt whenever I moved. My doctor had never seen it before. Mamère cared for me during this illness and sat with me when I lounged around, watching TV all day to minimize movement. She brought me food and brushed my hair. I didn’t know it as I snuggled into her lap, watching Boy Meets World, but she was much sicker than I was.
After our house was redone, we moved into the new empty rooms without personality, all the walls bare and the floors without rugs. The only impression that was left on me by the new house was cold. It didn’t have the warm that Mamère’s house had, there wasn’t the continuous smell of food cooking, baking, or cooling. There weren’t photos spanning back generations on the walls and there weren’t books spilling over bookshelves in the corners. Mamère’s bed wasn’t there, waiting for me to climb in and ebb away all my fears. It wasn’t home.
One year, a while after we moved in to our new house, it was Mamère’s turn to move in with us. All I knew was that she was very sick. To my six year old mind, I just thought she had a cold and was too tired to go all the way up the mountain to her house. She still moved around and was active around the house, even though she was very ill with breast cancer. She never stopped for me to sit and watch TV with her. She never sat still long enough for me to bring her food or brush her hair, although it never occurred to me that that is what I might have done. One night, Mamère was using the bathroom downstairs while my parents were talking upstairs. She, being too weak, could barely pull up her pants all the way. I helped to pull them up, lifting my skinny arms over my head to reach her waist and all I could do was feel pity. I didn’t know why she couldn’t do this trivial task by herself but I knew it was something to be pitied. That was all I ever did to help my grandmother as her cancer got worse.
Soon after, Mamère moved back into the house on the hill all by herself. She threw elaborate parties, cooked delicious three course meals, and hosted every holiday in her empty castle. I don’t know if she really was getting better, the eye of the storm, or if she couldn’t stand to seem weak, to be pitied by her six year old granddaughter. So she left and forged on with greater gusto than I can ever remember. She visited me in the flatlands every day or I returned the favor by visiting her home. The last few months were the most condensed time we ever spent together. She continued to host friends at her estate, throw parties for the outdoor art club, and sew me clothing. She never saw herself as sick and I think the reason she never admitted to her grandchildren that she was sick, or reached out to her children for help, was because she never really admitted to herself that she was sick. She proceeded moving forward, never looking back. But not everyone can outrun cancer, Mamère couldn’t.
I never really admitted to myself that something was amiss. I ignored the facts as they stared me in the face that my grandmother was growing weaker, her skin was dulling, and her voice was wavering. When her last weeks approached, my mother’s sisters and their children all moved into the house on the hill. My aunts stayed in their rooms with the children in sleeping bags on the floor. I thought of it like a family reunion, a giant slumber party. My grandmother grew too weak to sleep downstairs and they moved a hospital bed into the study so she didn’t have to climb stairs every morning and night. I looked at the bed with all of the gadgets and moving abilities and thought the reason she was staying upstairs was because she couldn’t fit her cool new bed downstairs. When she could no longer leave her new bed, I thought she was just tired and needed to take long naps.
One morning, while watching the little TV above the desk in the family room in Mamère’s house, my father slowly walked up the stairs to meet us. His head was slung low and he didn’t look up to meet his children’s, or his niece’s and nephew’s, gazes. Each aunt came in the room and separately called each pair of siblings into another area of the house.
“Veronica, Joseph,” my father started, kneeling to our level, eyes red around the edges and filling with tears. I looked out the window to the gray morning sky. “I have some bad news. Last night, Mamère passed away.”
Then, my father broke down and cried. Mamère, his mother-in-law, meant so much to him, that this was the first, and last time I ever saw him cry, really cry. Later, when his own father died, I never saw him shed a tear. I’m sure he cried behind closed doors and still does when he thinks about his father, but the only time I ever saw him break down and sob was when he told me Mamère had died.
The house stood in a perpetual twilight for the next few weeks, the sun forgetting to rise on the dark scene cast by Mamère’s absence. My mother stayed in her room and the cousins stayed out of the house. Day by day the fact that we wouldn’t be seeing Mamère again hit harder. She wasn’t cooking meals or humming songs. She wasn’t clipping across the hardwood floor in her high heels and smelling of Vaseline lotion. The rooms were all empty and her bed no longer provided the protection I needed from the spiders and everything else that I feared. She was no longer around to brush my hair and snuggle me in her lap. She wasn’t around to explain every little object and detail of her complex and titanic house. She was no longer there.
Eventually my mother came out of her room and the cousins played inside again. As my mother and her sisters boxed up my grandmother’s things, I saw much more of her life in objects than ever before. I saw she collected little animal pottery figurines and glass birds. She had rows and rows of shoes with heels, none of which surpassed three inches in height. As the books started clearing out of shelves and paintings started disappearing off of walls, we slowly packed up my grandmother’s life. The place we all avoided and left alone was her room with her vanity counter bathroom, her stained glass windows, our bed. But, time went on and, however painful it was, we had to box up even that room, the monument and footprint that was my grandmother. It still smelled like her and even though she was no longer there to see it, the sunlight still streaked in through the stained glass windows.
As we cleared out her closet, I noticed something high up, atop the cabinets, far from my ability to reach. Three or four wigs, all the same, of chestnut brown hair that sloped to the bottom and finished with a perfect curl. I pointed this out to my mother, thinking I had made a discovery worth noting, when she got a pained expression and simply said, “Yes, Mamère wore wigs, she had to go through an operation where she lost her hair.”
My grandmother stayed stoic and strong through a sixteen year battle with breast cancer, never playing the sick card to take a break from the hectic life she led. She put on a mask, and a wig, letting everyone know she could do it, that cancer wouldn’t stop her from living her life. But her refusal to face the truth led to my own refusal. I never admitted to myself that Mamère was sick and the only thing I did to help her in her time of need, how ever much she denied she was having one, was to help her pull up her pants.
Ten years later I still think about her castle with the winding passages. Whenever I can’t sleep and lay in bed or am scared and wish I was lying in bed with her, I walk through the hallways of her house on the hill. I step into the study with the oriental rug and the leather couch with pillows flourishing the fleur de lys; the bathroom with a peach toilet, shower and sink; the expansive living room with dark blue couches and a ten foot tall Christmas tree in December and a table of different glass, painted, and ceramic eggs during Easter. I walk through the kitchen where Mamère saved my stuffed monkey from death by burning by finding him in the oven, and I step down the carpeted stairs and walk down room after room, past the indigo blue smooth tiles and standing shower in the bathroom, past the secret door that lead to a cold cement crawl space filled with my eight legged nightmares, and continue on to her room. I see the specks of dust dancing like fairies in the sunlight, falling through the stained glass windows and turn to her giant and safe, four poster, deep rich wood bed. Our bed.
somelikeitmild 