Letters from Grenada

This photo of my mother was taken in 1970. She was a year out of college and teaching biology at Cathedral High School in New York City. She was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. Living in Manhattan was an enormous challenge for her. That first winter, she tells me, she got herself a long brown coat, her secret weapon against the weirdos on the subway who’d otherwise ogle her bottom.

That summer, she made costumes for Shakespeare in the Park. In the fall she continued to teach and also started graduate school at Columbia. The following summer, she and my dad got married. Five years after that, they moved to Nyack and had me. My brother arrived two years later.

It wasn’t easy for her, of course, when my dad left. But after a while she pulled herself together and did things she might never have done had they remained married. In Montana one summer, under the wing (ha) of a Native American named Brooke Medicine Eagle, she went on a vision quest. She taught at the Audobon Camp in Maine. She lived for a time on the Clearwater, the Hudson River Sloop. She published a short story.

Whenever there were breakthroughs in science, she’d get the newest college textbooks and teach herself whatever there was to learn. Dinosaurs, global warming, mitochondria, and neurotransmitters. For example. She was an enormously popular teacher and at least once a month I pass along to her Facebook messages that I can only describe as fan mail.

In 2001 she and her boyfriend of seven years got married, retired, sold the house I grew up in, moved onto a 45’ Herschoff Mobjack and sailed to the Caribbean. The lived on their boat and sailed from island to island until 2004. They were in Grenada when my mom got word that her father had passed away. She went to Indiana for the funeral, and several weeks later, while she was still in the States, her husband was very badly injured in an accidental fall. He needed orthopedic surgery, and medical care that was simply unavailable in the Caribbean, so she flew back to Grenada so she could be with him while they medievaced him to Florida. He was at one of the best hospitals in the country, and I was so certain he’d be fine, I didn’t talk to him on the telephone before his surgery. On the operating table he suffered a massive stroke. He never woke up.

It was, simply, the scariest thing that had ever happened to me. Not only John’s death, but what it did to my mother. I was so worried about her I couldn’t breathe, or cry, or imagine how we would ever again be whole.

She stayed with me in New York for a while, but by January she was itching to get back to Grenada. It had become home. And so she went. I followed her a few months later. I was supposed to stay for six weeks, but when my time was up I didn’t want to leave. So I stayed. For four years. By the first anniversary of John’s death, we had found a house, brought my grandmother to live with us, and I had met a guy and found a job. I was also pregnant. With Bean. Who is, by the way, named after the grandfather he never got to meet.

I still think about John a lot, and I know my mother does too. I do not think that I will ever, as long as I live, stop missing him. Nor will I forget what it was like to witness my mother become a widow. To watch her face crumple up with a sorrow I could not ever hope to soothe. But I am at peace with the knowledge that we survived the hardest part. We weathered the storm. And we are stronger for it.

Today is Mom’s birthday. She’s 63. She’s just as beautiful as she was at 24. She doesn’t have any wrinkles, and her white hair doesn’t really say “old”. It says “hippie snow princess”. She still bakes and sews and has an almost supernatural touch with our garden. She loves dark chocolate-covered chili peppers. She devours the books I recommend and then wants to talk about them for hours. She is quiet and shy and soft-spoken. She is nothing like me and she is also everything like me. And she is the best Grandma a Bean could ever have.

I love you, Mom. Happy Birthday.

Posted on February 8th, 2010 under Grenada • Tags: backstory, caribbean, childhood stories, early days, family, grandma kay, Grenada, grief, happy birthday, joaquin the illustrious bean, love, motherhood, PHOTOS. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback