Not long ago, I had a couple delicious hours alone and spent
it with a fun romantic comedy called The
Proposal.
There is a great scene where Betty White’s character, the
feisty and hilarious Grandma Annie, wants to give her wedding dress to Margaret
(Sandra Bullock).
“I can’t. I can’t
take this,” Margaret says, in an unexpected display of humble unselfishness.
Grandma Annie insists.
“Grandmothers love to give their stuff to their grandchildren. It makes us feel like we’ll still be part of
your lives even after we’re gone. Take
it.”
Instantly, I thought of my late grandmother. In the last five years of her life, she drove
us all bonkers because she talked incessantly about who would get what after
she was gone. Everything was up for
discussion: her Spode china, her stacks of valuable books, her silver, her
engagement and wedding rings, which grew increasingly loose and clink-y on her
finger as she aged and thinned. My
siblings and I rolled our eyes each time it came up, and my cousins were
similarly annoyed. It became a joke
amongst us, especially when my grandmother took to labeling things with index
cards so we’d know who was supposed to get particular items—and then frequently
moved these assignments around. On one
visit, I was slated to get her antique silverware; on the next visit, it was
now labeled for my sister. The Greek
brass drawings she’d acquired overseas were assigned to my aunt, then to my
mother, then to my cousin, and then back to my aunt. It was by turns hilarious and
infuriating—hilarious because we thought she was acting like lunatic, and
infuriating because it felt like she was using her stuff (her “stupid stuff,” I
believe I called them in my surly teenaged years) to manipulate us.
With time and reflection, though, my understanding has
changed. Now I know that she wasn’t
being a lunatic at all. On the contrary,
she was clear-eyed, focusing on passing on her things because she needed to
know they would continue to tell her story, and would remind the world that she
was here. And she moved her assignments
around because she wanted to make sure they were honored appropriately, and
worried about them landing in the right spot.
My grandmother assumed she would pass quietly in her
sleep, dignified and elegant, and her things would be taken, as assigned, in a
somber and grateful post-funeral walk through her house. Circumstances never play out the way they are
supposed to, though; her old-age illnesses drained her money, and many of her
things were sold. Others ended up in
boxes in a storage facility and, when it was finally cleaned out months after
her death, no one had the emotional or physical energy to allocate things with
the care we should have.
So in spite of my grandmother’s plans, I do not have her
high-heeled pumps or her tea set from Cairo, her English hats or her collection
of rare books. I ended up with just one thing:
a single gold wedding band.
And I value it like nothing else. I wear it every day, on the ring finger of my
right hand. I catch an unplanned glance
at it a hundred times a day, and when it happens, I have a milli-flash of
memory of my grandmother. Just a
snapshot, there and then gone, sometimes practically unconsciously: A memory of the time we made donuts together,
the most simple and delicious donuts I’d ever tasted. How she scolded me for sock-skating across
her hardwood floors. How she always ate
a breakfast of oatmeal with half a banana sliced on top, saving the other half
for the next day. How her words slurred
a little after too many vodka tonics.
How she pressed a $10 bill in my hand and told me to go buy myself a
“nice suit” for my graduate school intake interview. Her final months, when she insisted on a
glass of water by her bed at night with two—no more, no less—ice cubes in the
glass, refusing to reason with us about inevitable melting.
The gold band brings all of that back. Just this—this slim, indestructible, shining
reminder—opens up a slew of snapshots of a good woman’s life and the connections
she made with her granddaughter.
Here’s the thing: As
we go through this life, we never know when we’re taking a snapshot for someone
else’s memory, and we never know how many years will pass before it is seen
again. But it’s a good reminder to work
hard to build a gallery of positive snapshots, so no matter what we leave
behind, we’ll still be part of the memories our loved ones keep.
