her string of pearls

Can I get a small cup of black raspberry and a small cup of maple walnut, with covers on them?

I order our favorite flavors and place extra napkins in the bag before heading to my car. I know he’s just eaten dinner and this small gesture will send him over the moon.

He hugs me tightly and catch a glimpse of his face as he plants a kiss on my cheek. He asks how I am and I tell him I’m alright, you know, for the most part. His eyes retain a reddish rim, a scar from grief that always lingers just behind him. He nods, and blinks tears down his cheeks.

I went to visit your grandmother today. I visit her every day….

I ask him where her grave is exactly, I haven’t been yet. He tells me section 6, around the corner from the chapel where we said our final goodbyes. I should go soon. The thought makes it hard to breathe.

In a few minutes, we are talking about the weather – the humidity is brutal, we agree – and the vegetable garden he’s planted outside is really blooming. The hanging tomato plant is arguably his most exciting accomplishment, even the guys at Home Depot asked me to take a picture of it, he grins and dips his spoon into the dish. He takes me over to see the plants and shows me the tiny tomatoes that have sprouted on their stems. There’s a smaller, non-flowering plant in the corner and I ask him what else he’s growing. Kneeling down, he picks up a small reddish marbled bug and flicks it into the grass. Potatoes, he claims, first time in 70 years I’ve grown them. I read on the internet that you have to get rid of the potato bugs or else they’ll get the whole damn crop.

That he’s planted a garden at all makes my heart feel slightly more at ease. I feel broken by his pain every time we speak – the weight of it hanging in the air. And who can blame him? How does anyone say goodbye to the person who has stood with them through life for over sixty years and not exude grief and sadness?

We sit on the porch swing, slurping our melting ice cream as he tells me about the four potatoes he planted in the summer of 1934.

I was delivering telegrams all day and night, making two dollars a week and giving my mother one dollar and ninety-five cents of my pay. I’d take the nickel, run as fast as possible, scoop up as much penny candy as I could find , plop down the five cents and run just as fast to find a place to eat it all before my brothers caught me. My father helped me plant the potato buds just before his accident. After he died, I kept them up and they gave us food all through the fall. I never thought about doing it again until now.

He runs his fingers across his forehead, smoothing over the divets in his aged skin.

Don’t know what the hell I’ll do with them all now. Only so many potatoes one person can eat, he laughs before pausing. Then he begins to cry.

It’s like this every visit – we laugh and cry. Sometimes we eat, sometimes there are other people around and sometimes it’s just us. He tells me about his days, I tell him about mine. I tell him my favorite stories about her and he laughs. And then he cries. I tell him how much I miss her – because I think he understands in a way nobody does. Sometimes I barely talk at all, letting him speak his words to someone who will listen – knowing it’s all I can give him.

He hands me a box and in it are my grandmother’s treasured pearls. A necklace and a bracelet, a family heirloom that she used to remind me would be mine “some day.” I’d smile and nod, some day seemed so far away. I opened the cover and smell her perfume. It almost hurts to touch them, to feel their smooth, rounded edges and their delicate strings. I start to cry and he says, she made sure I had it put in her will that they were yours.

I struggle these days, losing both of my grandmothers in less than a year and dealing with losses of other kinds. I am fine, feeling triumph in my battle with grief and goodbyes – and then I am not, all over again.

This is the nature of loss, I believe. Of life, really. Hello, goodbye, and on again.  And all we can do is laugh and cry.