Dear Grandma,
I’ll bet you thought you were never going to hear from your youngest grandson again. I wasn’t too regular about writing to you for the last decade or two of your life, so you certainly shouldn’t be surprised that you haven’t heard from me since you left us.
From your vantage point, I would think it’s easy for you to see why I didn’t stay in closer contact. Not long after the last time I saw you, when we got together with Laura and Yvonne, Karl and Edith, little Karl, Linda and her kids, Jane, Dad, and all those others at your place in Middle River, my life started heading in a direction that I wasn’t ready to share with you. I hate the way that time and circumstances isolated me from you. It wasn’t that I thought you couldn’t handle the secret I was carrying around. It was just that I couldn’t handle it, and I didn’t have the first clue how to talk to anyone else about it. Looking back, I can only imagine that if I’d told you, you would have behaved true to the sweet, patient, loving, saintly Grandma you always were.
I hope you can see how much of you I carry inside me. I can’t scrape uneaten food into the garbage disposer without hearing your voice say, “It’s a sin to waste food.” I don’t hear it as a taunt, just a gentle reminder that abundance is a gift for which we should be profoundly grateful in this world of endless need. I’m glad you’re there reminding me. I’ve never known real hunger, so it’s easy to take what I have for granted.
And there’s a lot more than that. I would like to think that I took into my heart something of the lessons you taught us—about how a life with more than its share of pain, loneliness, grief, and deprivation could be lived with optimism, humor, generosity, and piety.
I wonder sometimes what you would think when I see pious people on TV spewing messages of intolerance. Your constant faith was never a weapon to use against people less faithful than you were. You sat by your radio praying the rosary hour after hour, you surrounded yourself with holy pictures, with prayer cards, with rosaries and statues—the Infant of Prague scared me a little—, with Crown-of-Thorns plants and crucifixes and every other sort of devotional object. But I never once heard you accuse anyone else of being un-Christian, or less Christian, or less worthy in any way of God’s love.
You were a model of faith and humility more real to me than any of your saints (dead or living). I hope you’re not disappointed that I haven’t held on to your kind of faith. I hope you know I try as hard as I can to cultivate your kind of humility.
I remember a story you told me once about Dad. It still fills me with pride for what it said about both of you. You told me of a day when some members of the local draft board came asking about him, wondering whether he planned to volunteer to serve in Korea. He was in college at the time, or maybe already in graduate school. You told the board members that your first three sons had all served in the military, and that you wanted your youngest son to stay in school.
One of the recruiters said, “You know, if he volunteers, he can become an officer. But if he gets drafted, he’ll be digging ditches.”
And you said, “And they’ll be the best danged ditches anyone ever dug!”
My memory might be a little shaky; I don’t think you ever used a word as strong as “danged” (unless you said it in Polish). But I’m sure of the sparkle in your clouded eyes when you delivered that punch line. “Danged” seems about right.
If you’re reading this letter somewhere out there, then I guess you already know I don’t believe in heaven any more. But I never lost my faith in your love.
Author’s note: The assignment was to write a letter to someone with whom you have not been in regular correspondence, but to whom you still have something to say. I don’t think this piece needs any further explanation.
That was a rare glimpse into your family history. And you tell it so well – I can see her sitting next to the radio with her rosary, and I can see her at the door figuratively standing between the recruiters and her son. She sounds like a great Grandma, and I feel the same loss of contact with my Grandma before she died. It’s too bad that we don’t figure out how important it is to stay close until we can’t do it anymore.
This one was sweet and a very well written tribute.
What a beautiful recollection of our Grandma. The only “complaint” I can remember was “ouch!” when she tried to pull herself up to stand, with her bad arthritis.
I know she loved you too! Enough to make up for anything lacking from the other side of Baltimore….