It's All Relative (18 page)

That was a mistake.

And when I longed to tell her the story of my life, to have her sit and listen to me around her Formica dining-room table like she did when I was young, it was too late.

“Wade?” I heard my mother say. “Wade, do you want to come in?”

I stood, rounded the corner, and my grandma looked at me, rather blankly, like a babysitter might look at a child they once cared for, with vague familiarity but no emotional ties.

“Mom? It's Wade? It's James Wade. Remember?”

I approached her bed gingerly, as if I were walking around land mines, and she looked at me, trying to fit the pieces together somewhere in her head, and when she did she began to bawl, to caress my face like it was a baby rabbit, as if I were the most tender and precious and beautiful thing she had ever seen.

And then she started screaming.

Always an emotional woman, my grandmother's illness had made her even more emotionally vulnerable, and my mother told me she would now start crying without reason at any minute of the day, unable to put into words her feelings of loss or fear or happiness.

I took a seat in one of those nursing-home chairs that looks inviting but is not comfortable, that begs you to sit but not stay, and listened to the roar of the TV infomercial my grandma had going.

My grandmother
never
watched TV.

I stared out the window and watched it rain, watched the wrens collect at the little feeder my mother had hung just outside of her window. My grandma's world was now this window.

My mom clicked off the TV, silencing the incessant noise and bringing blissful quiet to the room. A sense of calm seemed to envelop not only me but also my grandmother.

And then, out of the blue, my grandma began pointing at pictures on her wall and nightstand, at photos of her husband, her daughters, her grandchildren, of those who had died before her or those who rarely came to visit, and my mom would give one to her and she'd hold it closely, hugging the picture like it was the person, closing her eyes and remembering something from long ago.

My grandma would look at my mom, struggling to lift her hand to her mouth, and then point at the picture she was holding. She was asking my mom to speak for her. We sat for hours that Mother's Day, my mom telling stories of our family for my grandmother, and then at the very end my grandma pointed at me and then at a picture of me she had beside her bed, one of me when I was very little, dressed in a tiny bowtie.

“My baby!” she moaned, managing to find words from somewhere deep inside—words I thought she had lost long ago. “My baby Wade!”

And then it was me who began to cry, to bawl, my false bravado shattering, my gasps causing the wrens at the window to stop eating and take notice of the commotion.

My grandma lifted her fists and dabbed at my face, wiping tears, and then put her hands to her mouth, asking me to talk.

I scooched my chair up to her bed and held her hands, and it was then I knew that she knew me, truly knew me, because she just stared at me, smiling, like a baby at its mom, watching my every move, listening intently to my every word, like she did when I was young and we sat at her little kitchen table.

So I sat for an hour and finally told my grandmother about my life.

When we left her that day, I asked my mom on the ride home, “How do you do it? How
can
you do it? Every day? It's such an obligation.”

“The question is,” my mom answered, “how can I not do it?”

Her voice got a little shaky, and she said, “Do you know I visit nearly every person there? Their families and friends no longer come, because everyone is too busy to be bothered. Your grandmother spent her whole life sacrificing for me so I could be the first to go to college, the first to have a career, so I could have an easier life than she ever had.”

And then my mom slowed the car, her hands trembling on the wheel.

“And it's not an
obligation
, Wade. It's a
privilege
.”

There was an awkward moment of silence. I looked down at the speedometer and noticed my mom was driving twenty miles per hour. Joggers were passing us.

And then my mom, the lifelong nurse who retired and became a hospice nurse, said, “When parents and grandparents age and become infirm, families no longer want to deal with it. They visit in the beginning out of guilt, and then it becomes a hassle, something they have to do between soccer lessons and work. People see these as ‘the bad years,' but this is simply our time to take care of our elders, just like my mother cared for me when I was a baby. Those weren't such great years for her, I'm sure. She struggled to put food on the table. And I certainly couldn't talk. I could only tell her what I was thinking or feeling through my emotions. This is the same thing. She is the baby now. And I am the mother. It is my time to care for her, to let her pass on to God with dignity and love, to let her know during every single moment I spend with her these final days that it has been
my privilege
to be her daughter.”

It would be the last Mother's Day of my grandmother's life.

And, as I learned that day, it was my privilege—not obligation—to spend it with her.

M
any Memorial Days when I was a kid, I would accompany my mom and grandma around to the little cemeteries that dotted the Ozark countryside, the trunk of our car filled with miniature American flags, boxes of Kleenex, and a slew of fresh flowers from my grandmother's gardens.

While Memorial Day typically marked the end of school and beginning of summer vacation, our family would delay our departure to our log cabin on Sugar Creek until all of our “family visits” had been completed.

My grandma and mom would hit as many cemeteries as possible on Memorial Day with a great sense of purpose and a definitive agenda, like holiday shoppers the Friday after Thanksgiving.

My mom would slowly pull our car down the cemeteries' long dirt or gravel driveways and bicker with my grandma about who was buried where, my mom pointing this way, my grandma pointing the other, until both would give up and my mom would put the car in park and we would each grab a handful of fresh flowers, tiny flags, and Kleenex.

Ozark cemeteries were not lush, lavish, or large. Graveyards, as we simply called them, were usually compact and often rested on a
rolling foothill or quiet piece of country land next to a pastoral pasture. They were not filled with enormous marble headstones. There were no mausoleums. They did not sit on breathtaking cliffs overlooking the crashing waves of an ocean.

But Ozark cemeteries were plentiful—almost too plentiful, like churches—seemingly one for every large family. We even knew families who would purchase a depository of family plots for sisters and brothers, moms and dads, aunts and uncles, a life-insurance policy, as it were, so the family could remain together in death.

The weather always varied greatly on Memorial Days in the Ozarks. Some days were hot and stifling, portending a humid, windless summer where the unified cry of the crickets could almost make a man go nuts. And others were wet and cool, a gentle rain softening the earth, chilling our bones, turning the green grass on the graves even greener.

But the weather never deterred my mom or grandma. They made their way in sensible, respectful heels over mounds and molehills, in the rain or sweltering heat, wending their way among the graves, their arms interlocked, purses notched in their elbows, their heels often getting mired in mud, me following to wipe them clean with Kleenex that were originally meant for mascara-strewn eyes and cheeks.

My mom and grandma would seek out sisters and brothers, cousins and nephews, friends and neighbors, soldiers and war vets who had passed before them or in service to the country, my mom and grandma sharing stories about the dead and what each had meant to them.

It was standing in these graveyards that I got to know many of those family members I never had the chance to meet. Sometimes my mom and grandma would laugh, sometimes they would cry—depending on the person and the length of time they had been gone—but they always ended with the same ritual: My mother and
grandmother would kneel to say a prayer, pay their respects, and then plant peonies and American flags into the earth over the grave.

“See you next year,” they would whisper, passing a kiss from their hand to the earth before standing again, interlocking arms, and slowly making their way to the next party guest.

But when I was fourteen, a litany of death strangled my family in short order like a swarm of locusts—starting with my brother, Todd, who was killed in a motorcycle accident weeks after he had graduated from high school and weeks before I was to begin my freshman year.

Todd's death was quickly followed by those of my aunt and my grandpa—my mom's sister and grandma's daughter; my mom's father and grandma's husband—and it was then that our Memorial Day visits abruptly ended.

We simply headed to our cabin, taking a circuitous route that bypassed all local cemeteries, a task, I now realize, that must have taken a great deal of forethought.

As I aged, I didn't consider Memorial Day much beyond the fact that it gave me a three-day weekend, a kick-start to summer.

And then I met my partner, Gary, who, in many ways, reminded me of my grandmother. Topping the list, he was an avid gardener, just like her.

I always admired those who tended to the earth—a gift I did not have—and I guess when I saw Gary work his garden, I saw my grandma. I also secretly believed if Gary could cultivate seeds in a dead patch of earth, then he could surely nurture me back to life.

And yet for years, when Gary would ask me to join him in his garden, I always declined, hiding in the house, behind a curtain, or just off to the side of a window, watching him work, weed, mulch. And seemingly every time Gary would begin to dig a hole in his garden, I would turn away.

One scorching summer day a few years back, around the anniversary
of my brother's death, my parents drove up to visit Gary and me after we had moved to Michigan.

This had not been an easy visit for any of us, especially for me, since I found myself constantly preoccupied, even three decades later, with what my parents were still missing: my dead brother, his imaginary wife, the ghost grandchildren they would never hold.

Just before my parents were to leave, as I was dragging my mom's suitcase to the front door, I heard Gary ask her if she would like to go on a final tour of his garden. I hid behind a curtain in our cottage and watched Gary surprise my mom with a bouquet of peonies, along with a start of the plant in wet paper towels.

Suddenly my mother fell to her knees in his garden and started crying—convulsing, really—all the while hugging the peony start tenderly, as if it was an imaginary grandchild.

As my parents drove away, I said, “What was up with that? Are you the Flower Whisperer?”

It was my typical pattern: Sarcasm, like a good tan, could cover any defect.

“Those peonies,” he said, “are from your grandmother's garden.”

I stared at him. “What are you talking about? She's been dead for years.”

“Just smell,” Gary said.

He plucked a white peony with a pink center from our cottage garden and held it in front of my nose and, like some sort of scent therapy, the memories came flooding back.

My grandmother used to grow long rows of peonies on the back side of her Ozark house, a spot where the sun would bake them much of the day. She rotated bushes of white and pink, pink and white, and the flowers would grow so heavy that they simply exhausted the stems that valiantly tried to support them. Eventually her peonies would just flop on the ground like a tired, old dog, thick powder-puff blooms of soft pink and virginal white.

What I remember most was the flowers' fragrance, which would hang in the air like a cloud of perfume. For a few precious days, before a thunderstorm would come and knock off all the petals, I would rejoice in the peonies' thick smell, a fragrance so rich and deep, in fact, that it would scent the bedsheets that flapped on the nearby clothesline. I would fall into the pile of line-dried laundry when my grandma would bring it inside and roll around in crunchy, stiff sheets that smelled like heaven.

And it was then I remembered the conversations my mom and grandma used to have about these peonies as they drove to the cemeteries on those Memorial Days of my youth.

My grandmother intentionally planted two types of peonies, early and late blooming. The early-blooming peonies were planted for only one reason: so that she could decorate the graves of her family and friends on Memorial Day with not just real flowers but with flowers she considered to be the most beautiful in the world.

“I just don't understand how people can place plastic flowers on their loved ones' graves,” she used to say. “Peonies are the perfect flower.”

Which is why she always placed them on her family's graves.

And why I had buried that memory deep in the ground.

That summer day after my parents left, I stood in Gary's garden, remembering all this as he watered, and I started to cry, soaking his shoulder as the hose soaked the dry ground.

And it was then I finally accepted Gary's invitation: He asked if I would join him in his garden, and I—for once—accepted.

“The earth is what grounds us and connects us all for a very short time,” Gary said to me. “That's why I like to grow and share starts of plants with others—like your grandmother's peonies—because it's like sharing a memory with the world. Did you know your mom saved peony starts from your grandma's garden after she died, and then passed them along to me? It's a way to keep family
alive, to keep the memory of those we love in our home, no matter where we live or how much time has passed.”

The next Memorial Day, I surprised my parents by driving eleven hours to visit them in the Ozarks, telling them I needed a few days by the water at our new cabin, despite the fact I had Lake Michigan and a beach less than a mile from our house.