“My dad better not be messing with her up there... I'll kill him.”
My mom’s voice had changed. I sat in the passenger seat and focused on the skyscrapers in the distance. She was suddenly crying, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I broke again.
Her dad has been dead for 18 years. But as she drives down I-95 at nearly midnight, this is the thought that breaks the silence. Maybe it’s the one that hurts the least. And that’s saying something. Earlier that day, her mom died.
We were heading back toward my apartment. I wanted to stay with my mom, but she insisted on being alone. Five hours earlier, I had just arrived at the same apartment after eight hours of classes. I was washing dishes, pissed off that my garbage disposal was broken, water filling the sink. My phone rang. Of course she was calling now. I struggled to slide the touch screen bar with my nose. My wet hands dripped dishwater on the floor. “Hello?”
“What are you doing?”
I pinched the device between a shrugged shoulder and my ear.“Dishes.”
“Grandmom just died.”
I took the phone in my hand. I shut off the faucet. Some sort of heat filled me, rising up into my face. I’m not sure what I said. There was nothing I could say. Then I asked when.
“A few minutes ago. Are you alright? I have to go.”
Soon, my mom’s voice was gone and I was left alone. I sat on the floor and cried more than I ever have in my adult life. She was 68 years old.
I’m the baby in the photograph. It was taken on February 13th, 1999, three days before my first birthday. Behind me is my mom, behind my mom is her mom, and next to my mom’s mom is her mom. Looking at this photo now, my grandma's face tells me all the things I couldn’t understand while she was alive. She is smiling so wide that I can’t see her eyes. That’s rare -- her eyes were always her favorite feature. Bright blue. My mom tells me that Grandma never let her or her two brothers forget that they had brown eyes. She wanted to see that feature in her babies more than anything.
A year ago, the doctors removed one of those eyes to get rid of a tumor. She seemed okay at the time. She texted me, “I’m cancer free! Now I get fitted for my glass eye.” That was January 30th, 2019. On January 30th, 2020, I got the call that she died. My mom tells me now that in the last weeks, Grandma cried about her eye more than anything: “My eyes were my best feature, and they took that from me.”
In this photo, she smiles at me like it’s a miracle. In a way, for her, it is. I’m her first grandchild. She always wanted to have a lot of kids. My great grandmother, the tiny one beside her, had five girls, and she wanted to follow suit.
Grandma had my uncle, then my mom not much later. It was on the third try that things started to go wrong. She had miscarriage after miscarriage. They weren’t random. Her husband was beating her, worse than he did during the second pregnancy. But finally, she carried to term.
It was during childbirth that things went wrong this time. She needed an emergency c-section, or else she and the baby were both going to die. But her husband wouldn’t sign for the surgery. It’s not entirely clear to anyone what happened that day but when my Grandma came to, she and her baby boy were both breathing. She was alive, but the doctors had given her a tubal ligation. They sterilized her. Grandma would never have another baby.
After I got the call, all I could do was call a $32 Uber, as if I could afford it, and cry in the backseat of someone’s Toyota Camry. The skyscrapers turned to highway which turned to familiar northeast Philly rowhomes. I walked up the stairs to the door I’ve entered a thousand times before, but this time I hesitated.
I held her hand and spoke to her. I cried and told her everything I wished I’d said while she could still hear me. I knelt there until the two men in suits came to take her. I tried to soak up every detail of the moment, sure that this would be cemented in my memory. But I just keep coming back to this photo.
My mom and I both lived at Grandma’s house then, and we did for the first four years of my life. During the last few months of her life, she lived on a hospital bed in my mom’s basement. My mom slept on the couch beside her toward the end, and she tells me throughout the night Grandma would wake up crying, “Home. I want to go home.” And I think she finally did.