What is Left Behind

Nearly every night for weeks after she passes, I dream about my grandmother. In some she’s gone, in others she’s there but only partly. In one, she stands pale and powdered at a bathroom sink, helping my mom and me sort through the things leftover from her life. All these dreams are my mind’s way of doing its best to grout in the spaces that are suddenly open to the air as a result of her death.

At her apartment, not dreaming, I sort through the boxes of pictures and letters that she’d collected throughout her life. Pictures of her childhood, early married life, the catalogued years of both her sons’ growth from baby to adulthood, the inclusion of the ladies who became her daughters-in-law and their weddings, the countless pictures of her grandkids. Of me, her second grandchild. 

Because of all the pictures, the decades, the different generations, I get to take a time journey that goes even farther back than my grandmother’s birth. I look at the faces, knowing she would have had a story for nearly every picture, that she could have told me who this group in black and white was, why they’d gathered on that day, where they were, what they had said to each other. Her memory for details had been impeccable.

 

I’d always known that some day those details and all those stories I’d been told would be left to my unreliable memory. I’d always known I should have written everything down, recorded her telling the stories. But don’t we always think we’ll have a little more time to do what we should do?

Buried among the pictures of family, church friends, dogs, and their East Texas property Seven Oaks, she kept the pictures her brother sent her from his pararescue Air Force days, with penned lines written in the thin white margin around the photographs. One of him inside a transport, dressed in his camouflage holding a gun. Looking for hard work, he’d written. And then another of him tied round with rope being lifted in what was probably a rescue simulation. Found work! he’d written at the top of that one. A sign of his sense of humor. All this before he was killed in action over Laos while on a rescue mission.

In an envelope with other pictures and newspaper articles, I find all the letters her father had received during those Vietnam days and which she must have inherited upon her father’s death. Dear Sir, we regret to inform you. Missing in action. Status updated to killed in action. Officially inform you of his death. Deep regret.

How those words must have wounded then. How knowing her brother was dead closed the door to hope that he might still be alive and might one day come home again. How hard to have been brought to that point where all she was left with was a pile of memories of her love for him. Her older brother whom she never forgot. She had a picture of him on her dresser. Another in her study. She had a book of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Wall on her coffee table. More than once, she told me stories of him swimming out of sight in the ocean. How strong and fearless he was. How she was not. How he’d told her that each parachute jump was different and how much he loved jumping. How he had told her he reenlisted time after time so that my dad and my uncle wouldn’t have to go to war.

 

Did she dream of him nearly every night for weeks and years and decades after those letters came? 

What does it mean to be gone?

It’s weird, not unpleasant just weird, to think that one day, all that might be left of me could be these faded pictures. Pictures with stories attached that no one will know how to tell. 

Sitting on the floor in her study, I organize these pictures best I can and think that that’s okay. I’ll be gone. Gone the way of all things. Joining the ranks of all those who have gone ahead of me and whose memories I’ve brought back to life for just a glimmer of a moment as a story ghost, as a person known and loved by somebody somewhere at some point in time, perhaps now even giving them the chance to make a cameo appearance in my dreams.