When I told my grandmother, in a carefully written letter I mailed from Alaska, that my husband and I were separating because I had fallen in love with a woman, Gram wrote back almost immediately. Just days later, I opened my mailbox to find the legal-sized white envelope with Gram's graceful handwriting, the canary yellow paper inside. I wish I had that letter, still, but I know what it said: I love you. No matter what, I love you. Maybe she also talked about trusting my heart, or about sadness, but what I remember is her unconditional, unwavering love for me. "XOXOXO," she always wrote large beneath "Love, Gram".
That was seven years ago, when Gram was nearly 91 years old. An avid reader of
The New Yorker, she possessed a clarity and a progressive awareness of the world, and so she was unsurprised to have a lesbian granddaughter -- or at least not any more surprised than she felt to have a granddaughter who had chosen to live so far away in Alaska, so distant from beloved Iowa.
Gram loved Mary Oliver's poetry, and she read every word Willa Cather ever wrote (every time I visited, Gram wanted to know if I had visited the sand dunes in Nebraska yet -- Willa Cather wrote so beautifully about them, you know). We never talked about the fact that both Oliver and Cather were lesbian; that wasn't the point, anyway, when we discussed Oliver's existentialism or Cather's astute observations about human beings' relationships to the landscape. It wasn't an issue with Gram. I think she might have said that people love whom they love.
Ali met Gram when Gram was 92, when we took her two kids on a whirlwind tour of Iowa before I traveled to Ethiopia to adopt Mitike. I knew Gram missed my husband Matt, his gentleness, his quiet appreciation of her garden, the way he loved to stand at her tall windows with his binoculars raised to study the birds. I knew she corresponded with him sometimes still. But she embraced Ali, pulled her in, found love for her, too. When Ali rose early to walk the neighborhood, Gram nodded at her from her chair, observing to me later that she appreciated Ali's wish to "greet the day". She had always dealt with hearing loss in her life, but she could hear most of what I said when I spoke loudly and slowly -- Ali spoke too fast. Gram just grinned at me. Later, in a letter, she reminded me about Mary Oliver's partner Mary Malone Cook, the photographer, whom Oliver said in
Our World had always moved at a different pace, and so had enriched their lives.
When Ali died, Gram was 96. I couldn't write her for a long time; it was hard enough to breathe; it was hard enough to choose each morning to live. Gram wrote to me: "now live forward in the ways she showed you". Months and months later, I drove from Colorado to Iowa with Mitike in the car, arriving at Gram's house late at night to find a note on yellow paper on the chair by the door: "WELCOME! You are LOVED. XOXO." The next morning, while my younger cousins entertained Mitike, Gram and I talked for hours, sitting in the chairs in the living room, sometimes lapsing into comfortable silence while we gazed out the window at the sassafrass tree and the cardinals on the bird feeder. Eventually, Gram told me about what it had been like to lose my grandfather 31 years before, how it had been several years before she could remember him healthy, how her grief had sometimes threatened to defeat her. Tears blurred my vision. How often had I railed at the unfairness of what had happened to me and Ali, that we had found such real love and then lost it in such an awful way? Gram's voice: "Now when I remember him, I'm comforted." I nodded, feeling only sorrow.
Last March, Mitike and I flew to visit Gram, and I marveled that at 97 she was more current with world events than I was, that she was reading a thick tome about Thomas Jefferson, that she wanted to know if I knew of the poet Linda Pastan, who had just been published in
The New Yorker. I had gotten healthier. I could feel my grief turning into something new in me, a stone, still, but more manageable, something closer to wisdom. I had decided to search for a new job, maybe move to a new city, and I had made a plan to memorialize Ali in the Yukon. Gram listened to all of this, observing my tears, too. I can't remember exactly what she told me, but later she would write in a yellow letter: "Go whole-heartedly with your decisions. They're good ones." And when I arrived at her house last week, for Gram's funeral, I found the piece of paper on which I had written the Whitman words I wanted to say in my Yukon ceremony. Gram had kept it close by her chair all those months.
As I stood at the gravesite last week in front of the oak coffin that contained Gram's body, I felt sad, but I also kept thinking how utterly incredible
ninety-eight years is. I thought that Gram had gotten a rare chance to live that long and full of a life, and that she had made of her life something beautiful, and that she had
loved so many people so well. Grief for my grandfather, who has been buried at that site since 1980, or for Ali, who became ash at only 42, is of a different category. Now, I cried for myself, mostly, for the loss of the person other than Ali who had always understood me fully. For Gram, though, I thought of the Oliver poem "When Death Comes": "I want to step through that door full of curiosity, wondering:/ what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?" I can see her there with her walking sticks, peering ahead, sharp and interested as always.
The strangest quality of being alive is that we must live knowing we will die. Wendell Berry wrote, "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts." Gram did that. I touched her hand for the last time, reaching past the edge of the coffin, and thought, I could live like that, too. I could live joyfully though my heart aches, though I rage sometimes at all I find unfair, though I sometimes feel unbearably weary. I could make of my life "something particular, and real", as Oliver says.
Gram would write in response to all of this: "You ARE. XOXOXO."
