Short Story: Grandma Brooklyn

We got the call that she had fallen and didn’t get up. This was years in the making. The first time we got that call was when we were on a vacation in Florida. My crying yet unsurprised mother had been somewhat waiting for that call but really never being ready. When are you ever ready for the call that a family member you love has died? Fortunately for us it was only a scare. The next few years had this collectively held breath within our minds, waiting and knowing that any phone call can be the last. And we got that call in May of 2013, the day after I had come back home from my freshman year of college. We let the collectively held breath go, and so did she. We planned a trip to Brooklyn in a matter of hours. Knowing my dad, and I lived with him for 23 years so I can say I know him, it usually takes him two days to not be tired from a long road trip. From Georgia to North Carolina takes a solid six to seven hours if you get stuck in regular traffic. From North Carolina to Brooklyn is eight to ten hours. On top of what we had to deal with, we weren’t going here on the best of terms.

Ten hours in a car, as a regular staple of my childhood, has made me hate road trips. My friends love them and I can’t stand them. When you spent as much of your childhood traveling by car, you’ll understand why you hate being in them for anything longer than an hour. She lived in this senior living apartment on Evergreen in Brooklyn, maybe a good ten minutes away from Flushing Avenue where the G train stops, near an Episcopal church the name of which escapes me. On the fifth floor, the place forever smelled of old people and I can never get that smell out of my mind whenever I go anywhere. It’s not an unclean smell or a damp or moldy one. It’s a distinct one that I always fail at describing. The next four days were pure exhaustion and pettiness. This was the week I found out how petty my family really is.

The casket wasn’t supposed to be open. She looked terrible. The funeral was early in the morning and really we just wanted to get it over with. Both of my parents being pastors, dad was officiating the funeral. When my parents were dating, grandma (technically speaking she was our great grandmother) played a really big role in their lives and helped a lot as they got themselves off the ground. He owed a debt of gratitude to her and it showed. In Hispanic culture, grandma being Ecuadorian, what abuela says is law. You respect her. And so he did. And it went well with him all the days of his life. The room was filled with lives who were grieved at her passing. The microphone was passed around, grieving mouth to grieving mouth. People struggling to hold it together as they remembered how they first came to the states and she opened her doors without concern or repayment or help of any kind. She was a pious Catholic. My family came from South America here, a large chunk of them, and grandma was the door that helped them survive here. The room was filled with love for the open casket. Which wasn’t supposed to be open. I looked to my mother, looking at the sleeping body, and I go “She looks horrible.” I have no sense of reverence. I thought she, in true Hispanic fashion, would take her shoe off and hit me with it but she agreed with me. It wasn’t supposed to be open. Family infighting and a sense of entitlement to controlling the terms of the funeral left it open.

Me, my father and younger brother, and a lot of other family members, carried the casket into the funeral car. Inside the casket was my childhood, the ridiculously amazing chicken soup with was more whole chicken than it was soup, the Christmases and birthdays, and the spanish culture and stories I’ll never know. That day she joined her husband of thirty years and three or four of her seven odd kids gone before her. We jump into our van to go through Brooklyn traffic and follow the funeral car. What amazed me then, and now, years later, was that the traffic didn’t stop fully but it seemed to slow down more so than usual. Like the city knew the kind soul that it had lost, and took its ball cap off in respect. The way you do in church when you wear a hat and someone starts praying so you take the hat off in respect. This wasn’t a cheerful sort of funeral where you go “Let’s celebrate her life and remember her for who she was.” Oh no. God no. This was one of those funerals that could be summed up in a collective sob. I wasn’t like that. I was nineteen and this was my first funeral. I was watching and paying attention. It was all I knew how to do. And so we stepped into the cemetery where she now rests.

The cemetery workers lowered her into the ground, all of our hands holding a healthy rose. The flower was probably the most alive thing we had seen all day, a part of us being lowered into the ground with her. We all dropped our roses onto the casket, sitting as a testament to a part of our lives now gone. I looked at the other gravesites, various tombstones stuck into the ground. Years later I read while browsing online a quote someone had written that said “A cemetery is a place full of people that said ‘I’m right’”. It’s haunted me ever since. She joined her three or four children and her husband of thirty odd years. She never dated again or remarried by her choice. The cemetery workers started throwing dirt onto the plot and we all went to our own ways. My mom, leaning into my father, finally let go. She tried holding tears in for too long. It was the early afternoon and we had a long drive ahead of us. Another ten hours in the car. Nobody said a word the entire trip.

Don't even get me started on the piragua guy that works here.

This past November, fast forward to 2016, my dad texted me to bring back coffee for the house I drank all of it to make sure I can speak coherently at work. I go to the Publix near the house on Kildaire, and walk through the coffee aisle to get the only coffee suitable for our liking: Cafe Bustelo. Before I found it on the shelf I saw this small plastic jar with coffee in it a few steps away from the Cafe Bustelo. Sanka. It had a yellow twist off top to it. Grandma always made cafe con leche when my parents were there and we always wanted some because we wanted to be grown ups and drink coffee for fun. My brother and I used to want to drink coffee for fun. That’s how young we were. And she used Sanka. I remember being six years old when I climbed a footstool to open the cupboard to look for something and I saw that on the wooden shelving. I was twenty-three when I saw it again. And I remember going, in my head, “That looks famili...oh.” I bought the coffee, and stepped into my car. The remainder of the grocery visit was silent. I pulled the skin on my face down with my left hand, breathed a frustrated sigh. Now it affects me. Now it kicks me and when it does it kicks hard. But why now? I may never know that answer. I drove home in silence.