My Grandma
My grandma passed away as I was watching Meg 2. It feels as ridiculous to say as it does to type. How could two disparate events be connected in time so permanently? My memories of my grandmother are now forever linked to memories of Jason Statham murdering prehistoric ocean monsters. My grandmother a real, living person of flesh and blood and a movie so haphazardly thrown together it barely even qualifies as having plot.
I stepped into the theatre knowing she was sick. We had known for a long time in fact. Over the last year as I saw her at gatherings or just random occasions she got thinner and thinner. At some point she began using a walker to get around being unable to keep balance on her own. It’s strange seeing a relative slowly lose their vitality, each time you see them you are made aware of the impending doom awaiting them, and each time you slowly come to terms with what’s heading their way. That’s just me of course, my mother probably sees it much differently having put a lot of effort and energy into worrying about her mother the last year of her life. She took the time to take her out to lunch or dinner here and there and when they were feeling extra rebellious they would go to the casino which my grandma really loved. She didn’t live with my mom though, she lived with my aunt not but 20 minutes away having permanently moved to Palmdale from El Salvador so she could live closer to (most) of her children and grandchildren and get better medical attention (which is honestly debatable but that’s a whole other blog post).
I would not say I was very close to her though. For the last decade or so she remained mostly a fixture at parties and birthdays. She was eternally sitting on the couch or using the restroom or sipping coffee or soup. But she would watch and observe, giving curt nods or responses when someone approached her. She was not what you would imagine a typical grandmother is like. She was not doting or fussy, and not chatty or opinionated. She was stoic and taciturn and forever serious. The interactions I would have with her would play like a series of questions and answers, a matter of facts and niceties and not much else. She wasn’t cold or belittling though, just reserved. Honestly this is where I felt the most kinship with her since I am the same way in social situations and we made excellent couch buddies just sitting there in silence and watching the goings on of those around us. My sister made a great point to me that the odd moment where someone could make her break out into laughter or a smile really left an impression on you, and that’s probably what I’ll miss the most.
I don’t take issue with her for being that way either, she’s a survivor of the Salvadoran civil war, and my mom has plenty of stories of having to run through the jungle to hide from helicopter fire or being shut in their house together to avoid soldiers on both sides of the conflict from taking issue. I cannot imagine the horror of living through a war, literally it’s not possible…I’m a peacetime schlub, and I hope I am never able to. Yet the repercussions of that conflict reverberate through my entire family, psychologically and physically and I don’t think anyone can handle that much distress and come out okay on the other side but yet here they all were establishing a foothold in a hostile country, putting the next generation through school, and finally culminating in allowing me to sit in a coffee shop and write alternatively dumb and cerebral blog posts without having to worry about my basic needs or threats to life and limb (other than self sabotage of course). For that I am, and must be, eternally grateful to my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and the vague wider cast of close family friends that built their house of cards life in the US back in the 80s.
With the death of my grandmother I am left bereft of grandparents. That whole generation save a couple of great aunts and uncles has departed this realm and with them goes a whole way of life to which my connection is severed. My trip to El Salvador last year really opened my eyes to a lot of the stories and relationships that have followed me and my family my whole life but writing about it became overwhelming, so I’ll come back to that some day. But case in point is that with every year I grow more and more distant to those roots and me and some of my cousins seem to be the only ones interested in preserving at least some of the pieces of those twisted, withered roots. I guess the lingering question is why does it matter? Placing my existence in context has revealed itself to be more or less my raison d’etre and there is so. much. context. Technically, every preceding event that has ever occurred has lead to this, to me. Undoubtedly some things are more important than others though and that’s the Jairo based ontological excavation that I have undertaken.
So my grandmother’s death is both symbolic and personal. That’s redundant though as nearly everything that occurs is symbolic, especially to a literary eye. I wonder if she ever struggled with these questions of existence, of purpose, of living. Did she suffer from ennui, depression, or just malcontent? I’m not sure. I never asked her and she never talked about it to me and I’m dubious ever even mentioned it at all. I don’t want to say that if I had more time or if I had known I would have tried to ask her about all of this, or about herself. Even if I had known she was leaving the earth in a day I don’t think I would have sat down to talk to her like this. To me it would feel disingenuous and disrespectful, a person should be allowed to take their secrets and their being to the grave if they wish. If she never felt the need to discuss it then who would I, or anyone, be to ask her about it. She lives on as she wants to be remembered and that memory is something I won’t begrudge.
Grandma didn’t die in Palmdale though, she went back to the motherland, El Salvador to pass away. I don’t know whether she did this on purpose, all I know is the timeline of events is suspect. My aunt says she wanted to fly back and visit and a week later she went from being just generally sick to taking a turn for the worse. The doctors there gave her a prognosis of death and that’s where the chaos began. My mom of course had to fly out there as fast as she could accompanied by most of my aunts and uncles eventually. My grandmother lasted five days in a state of fasting, eating very little to nothing, at first suffering painfully from her ailments but soon after being administered a sedative out of mercy. My last conversation with her was a brief video chat on whats app in which she was cognizant of me and nodded as I told her I loved her and I wish she got better, taciturn until the end. Eventually she passed away surrounded by her children and some extended family that lived in El Salvador. My mom watched as she gave her last breath. I don’t know if this is the perfect death or the worst but that’s how it happened.
Was it right as Statham launched an exploding harpoon into the head of a Megalodon? Or when he picked up a helicopter blade and impaled an Alpha Megalodon? I’ll never know and that’s a mystery I don’t care to solve. I like to think that it was her choice to go back home and pass away, that it was totally in her control which is a very rare opportunity afforded to anyone in this life. She was buried the very next day as is tradition in El Salvador in a service attended by friends, family, and loved ones.