The Dead Grandmother Essay

In my line of work, I meet a lot of dead grandmothers. Mostly they’re saintly, but occasionally they’re late to parties. Sometimes they’re self-absorbed or frivolous or extraneous or a burden. But whether revered or resented, it’s always a wretched experience to recall their turkey meatballs or sympathetic ears, to wade through the muck of what one should have said or done before it was too late.

The Dead Grandmother Essay is a subgenre of its own, an outgrowth of a creative writing classroom in which I encourage students to write about things that matter to them at a time in their lives when many are not entirely sure what does. The Dead Grandmother Essay offers a way to strike some deep notes, to practice gravity without succumbing to it. The Dead Grandmother was bound to die, after all, and in that way is not at all like The Dead Mother or Father, who elicits an entirely different kind of essay. The Dead Grandmother is usually safe in a way that the Dead Mother or Father is not, but it is also this safety—the remove from any immediate vulnerability—that means the Dead Grandmother will primarily be an exercise, a vehicle for testing certain registers, to see how they align with your range. Sometimes the product is moving, but more often it tries to be moving and fails.

Failure isn’t such a bad thing, however, and because the student writer is learning her craft, because few students have hitched their lives to writing, the stakes of failure are usually low. Causing a disinterested reader to care about the qualities of your Dead Grandmother’s macaroni salad, moreover, or failing to, doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to bring a reader to care about other things in the future. Writing, like all art, is practical: you learn, or don’t learn, by doing.

For my part, I much prefer The Dead Grandmother Essay to some of its fellows. Consider the Big Game Essay, in which a young person recounts the glories of winning the state championship, learning to love squash, or walking on to the college’s field hockey team. These essays may have all of the commas in the right places, they may even have a compelling structure, but they rarely intrigue and, injuries notwithstanding, they never bruise. The narrating persona is generally the hero of the Big Game Essay, and conflict tends to be situational. The stakes may seem to be high, but the Big Game Essay erects an almost insurmountable barrier between the reader and the writer’s vulnerabilities. The centrality of a ball, even when it’s shaped liked a puck, is a giveaway: we are in diversionary territory. Life happens outside of the marked field or court, not within it, and so it’s difficult for such essays to channel or simulate necessity in the manner of the Dead Grandmother.

Because the point of The Dead Grandmother Essay isn’t the Dead Grandmother, it doesn’t actually need to be about a Dead Grandmother, much less a Dead Grandfather, although it needs to take place in her vicinity in ways that the Dead Father or Big Game Essays do not: close, but not too close, to the bone. It probably goes without saying that The Dead Grandmother Essay doesn’t even need to be an essay. I’m certain that fiction writers and poets are aware of corresponding, genre-specific versions. Many, if not most, writing students have to produce a version of The Dead Grandmother Essay. It’s almost a rite of passage.

Born in 1931, my own grandmother recently turned eighty-eight, but she had spent much of the previous year in and out of the hospital. She has a thirty-year-old artificial heart valve that should have failed years ago. The blood thinners she takes to keep her body functioning have complicated her chronic diverticulitis, leading to a couple of episodes in which it appeared she might bleed out through her rectum. Aging is one thing, but old age is another, and as my parents report from their home in Michigan, having just returned from another visit to the emergency room, my grandmother is a very old woman.

Her death, when it comes, will be a mixed blessing. She has had a difficult, in many ways unenviable life, and her relationship with my parents, her primary caregivers, has often been strained. And yet for all of us her death will represent the end of a generation, the last of a set of old bulwarks against time. Her death will mean that my own parents, along with the entire boomer generation, will now be on the frontlines. Barring any unforeseen catastrophes, they will be the next to go. My proximity to death may seem to increase, or accelerate.

My grandmother has done many of the things one expects of grandmothers. She has made me meals I didn’t particularly enjoy before sending me home with leftovers. She has given me token amounts of money at irregular intervals. As a kid, I remember her hosting my brother and me while our parents went away, and I remember these visits, perhaps unfairly, as frosty. I will likely remember her, on balance, as a cold person, bitter and ungenerous. I don’t relish that admission, but it would be untrue to pretend my experience of her was something it wasn’t. She has often been unkind and manipulative, and after she has died I won’t be able to wash that impression from my mind.

For most people in her life, she has been difficult to love. She and my grandfather were married, to each other, three times over the course of their lives together, and much of my father’s particular blend of neuroses was forged during those years when, as a small child, the family was careening from one fight to the next. My own Dead Grandmother Essay, were I to write one, would require me to situate my grandmother’s life in my own, to identify the through line that connects those fights to the sense of inadequacy that accompanied me from childhood to middle age. My Dead Grandmother Essay would have to establish my feelings for her in the feelings I received from her, however indirectly. In order to speak about her, and about her death, I would first need to identify which parts of myself were affected.

This is the lesson of Vivian Gornick’s essential book, The Situation and the Story: to know why you’re speaking you must know who is speaking. I’m not sure the who always comes before the why, that persona always precedes purpose, but I think Gornick is right that the two are connected. To know why my grandmother’s death might affect me, I need to know who I am in relation to her, and it’s also true that to know who I am, I need to know why she matters. It’s more of a dance than cause and effect.

But this is a Dying Grandmother Essay, not a Dead Grandmother Essay. She remains a moving target, one I have loved with filial affection, in spite of her flaws. She is an active presence in whom I see many of the traits she passed down to my father. He has her eyes, for instance, and as he ages I see, far more than his father’s, dead for most of my life, her face in his. Like her, he has always been sharp-witted and perceptive. Her speech, like his, and like mine, sometimes conceals subtle barbs. All of us are, to varying degrees, both pleasant and prickly, although we hide the latter well.

And therein lies the dilemma: a dying grandmother is not as safe as a dead one. There are risks involved in writing about her. It’s unlikely she will ever read this essay, but theoretically she could, as could my father, whom I have unflatteringly compared to his mother. Either could take offense. Feelings could be hurt. Ties could fray. And for me there’s always the danger of recognizing something in myself I don’t want to see, some tendency that marks me as one of them, perhaps a worse version. For surely neither would be as callous and untoward as to take as a subject, almost facetiously, the impending death of a family member. Neither would be as mercenary and cynical.

Such risks are generally missing from the Dead Grandmother Essay. It isn’t true that the dead can’t hurt us, but it is true that we can’t hurt them. In speaking about them, we are never speaking to them. We shout or whisper as into a void.

The possibility of damage is almost a precondition of creation, which isn’t the same as saying that damage is an inevitable outcome, nor that benefits are directly proportional to risks, some of which, I would argue, aren’t worth taking—the costs would be too much, socially or psychologically. The thing the Dead Grandmother cannot teach you, even if it sets you on your way to learning it, is the difference between the risks worth taking and the risks not worth taking.

The writer’s work, James Baldwin argues, must be unconcerned with personal advantage. Or, as I once heard Kristin Dombek say, we cannot be the heroes of our own essays. The truth, Baldwin writes, “is a two-edged sword—and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.”

Beginning writers are almost never willing to die on the sword of their truths, nor should they be. There will be plenty of time for that later, when they’ve assembled enough self to withstand the effects. The process of producing one’s first efforts as a writer, especially in the context of a classroom, is often delusional and fraudulent and even self-gratifying. It’s rarely wicked or treacherous, though. As a fantasy, it’s productive and pedagogical: imagine you were writing your truth—what would that look like? What subjects would it involve, what stories? From which aspects of your life would it proceed?

At the moment my grandmother lives on the top floor of an old hotel built in 1925 and converted into a retirement home a half-century later. When I visited my parents a few weeks back, she asked over dinner to come to church with me the following day to hear my parents sing in the choir. She wanted to spend time together, she said, and afterward we could all have lunch at the hospital cafeteria, where the three of them apparently like to go. It’s quiet, they said, and has a good salad bar.

I hadn’t been to a service in maybe fifteen years, and my grandmother—despite her fondness for my parents’ lesbian minister—has always been skeptical of the Episcopalian tradition, so the two of us sat in the last pew, observing more than participating. Neither of us wanted to partake in communion, and kneeling would have been out of the question for her. But at one point she turned to ask whether I attended church at home, and when I said I didn’t she asked, either out of curiosity or concern, whether I had faith. I gave a verbal shrug, something like an eh pressed through clenched teeth. I’d so enjoyed her company the night before, drinking wine and laughing about the cafeteria—which I vetoed, incidentally—that I’d forgotten she knew how to shame, as do I.

After church, we ate sandwiches in her apartment, in which all signs of the old hotel had been renovated out of recognition. We drank premixed margaritas, and the flowers I’d brought for her birthday—the purples and pinks she prefers—sat in a vase on the counter. Would this be the last time I saw her, I wondered, as I’ve wondered each time I’ve seen her in recent years. And what sort of grandson had I been? I had never felt it necessary to fill the holes in her life, to give her, except in small doses, the love she feels the world has denied her. I accepted long ago the notion that she would die a lonely, unhappy death, and that this has been at least partially her fault. She has always seemed tragic to me in ways she has cultivated but also been oblivious to. I don’t envy her, but I suspect she means more to me in life than she ever will in death.

As I hugged her that day, her body was frail, her embrace weak, but she filled my pockets with miniature candy bars I wouldn’t eat. We would be back next summer, I said—we would see her then. I didn’t know if it was true.