Narrative Nonfiction: My Grandmother’s Hands

I have been told that I have my grandmother's hands.  

It is intended as a compliment; she had been a hand model for a time. Long and slender fingers, small palms, deep nailbeds. I am just vain enough to agree.  

But when I look my own hands, I don't hear the compliment as intended. 

I hear the syncopated clatter of well-groomed nails against a wooden table, hands shaking and interlacing, fingers dancing over each other like butterflies too nervous to land. I hear the whistling of breath, short inhales and stuttering exhales, and the accompanying puff of oxygen. I hear the question, belligerent in the way only people who know their mind has failed them can manage, "Why am I still alive?" 

"Happy birthday, Mom." 

It is forcefully light. In my memory, my aunt says it with infinite patience, rubbing my grandmother's shoulders as they scrunch up by her ears tight with tension. She was always the best with Grandma's changing personality. I grew up hearing stories about a fiery temper in my aunt’s youth, but I have never witnessed it. Perhaps it is something you grow out of or into. Perhaps, out of the three sisters, she was the most able to put aside her own fear of dementia, of becoming like her mother and aunts to give only kindness instead. Maybe she put it in the same box where she stows her muffled anger.  

"The Lord was supposed to take me," Grandma insists, petulant in the face of being denied such a reasonable request. "I was going to die and be with Jim." 

"We're just happy that you're here with us now," my aunt soothes. "I am sure Dad is happy that we got to spend today with you." 

Grandma grumbles and hisses like an over-boiled pot, stopping the clicking of her nails against the table as she tightly crosses her arms over her chest. She tilts her head away from the cake and everyone gathered around it, turning her nose up at this celebration of her life. We sing anyways. My cousin blows out the candles for her, like he always does and she no longer can.  

When I look at my own hands, I don't want to see hers. 

I don't want to see the fingers, bloodless and pale, interlaced over her stomach and, for once, utterly still. Even in death, her nails were long and well-shaped.  

I had stared at them more than her face as I came to the chilling realization that I was not very sad.  

She had been in so much pain. Her hips, her lungs, her heart. All she had wanted was death, and now that she had it, who was I to begrudge her?  

And glancing around discretely as the family huddled by her open casket in the church vestibule, I observed that I was not the only one. No one was happy, per say, but I have seen my family in grief, and that was not what it looked like.  

Grief was Grandpa's funeral. 

Grandpa was gregarious. He worked a room with smiles and laughs, and he had that sort of electric charisma that made it feel like you were the center of the world when he listened. 

Grandma was distant. And dementia had rendered her taciturn, prone to tantrums and digging in her heels, throwing rocks at the neighbor's house and hours of Game Show Network reruns. 

They had loved each other fiercely, unwaveringly, through sickness and through health. 

My grandmother rarely knew my name. Sometimes I was one of my cousins. Sometimes I was my mother's sister. Sometimes I was "Who's that?"  

But she never forgot that she wanted to die. That she would rather be with Jim. That she would rather embark on life's greatest and most feared journey with the hope of seeing him one more time than continue lingering even one more day.  

She had been insulted by every holiday that she lived through without my grandfather by her side. Every birthday was a disappointment when she did not get the one gift she wanted.  

Stubborn, mulish, she did not wait long.  

She was so strong. She grew up on a farm during the Great Depression. I shudder to think that the Dust Bowl blew away her early childhood. Her mother left, or perhaps "escaped," moving to New York City to get away. There was hardly a place more distant and dissimilar to the rural plains of Eastern Colorado. Grandma even joined her mother there for a time when she was a young women. She became a hand model. But she did not stay long; I don't think the city air agreed with her. Or rather, so I guess.   

Grandma did not talk about her own life, and she never once mentioned her father. I have nothing to craft my theories with but the rumors of a dead generation and too many hours of professional development in a school cafeteria learning about childhood trauma from a slideshow.  

As I stood above my grandmothers casket, observing the living faces instead, I knew that I was not the only one who was not sad. This was not my family in grief; this was my family in guilt. Nor was I the only one to come to this cold realization, and I could see the stiff shoulders, the pinched eyes, the performatively-solemn proclamations of loss from those who chafed under it the most.  

Tucking into my dad's side, I whispered some of my observations to him as he kissed the top of my head and rubbed my arm with a warm, calloused palm. 

He had enough tact to neither confirm nor deny my suspicions aloud. All he said was, "She's with Jim now." 

She's with Jim now. 

It was the refrain of the day. Everyone pretended not to hear when too much relief slipped into someone's tone.  

It is hard to mourn someone you never knew, and I never really knew my grandmother. I had met "Grandma," surly in her forgetfulness and often confused. She made excellent spaghetti with meatballs, was so proud of being Irish that it was half her wardrobe, and watched Family Feud. I have no memories of her before dementia. I never met Pat. 

I was seventeen when Grandma died. My nails were chewed short with anxiety and the skin on my knuckles cracked and bled from school days' worth of hand sanitizer and dry Colorado air. No one compared my hands to my grandmother's back then.  

But now I keep them neat, pretty, like little baubles on a shelf, a cabinet of fragile tchotchkes. I am too stingy to pay someone else for a manicure, but I have moisturizers and creams, I push my cuticles and grow out my nails and paint them with practiced ease. It is a small comfort, a petty vanity that I cling to with white knuckles. It is the one thing about them I can control. 

When I look at my mother's hands, they are the same. Three generations of slender fingers and long nails, graceful and shaking. But her skin is starting to grow thin and wrinkle, and while I look and still see something beautiful, my mom sees something to fear. She does not want to be mourned twice: one death final and the other slow.  

When I look at my hands, they hurt. Literally. Not in the verbose and overly encumbered with metaphors way that I write. The joints are weak and achy, they have been since I was in college, and there isn't much that can be done. Somedays I can ignore it. Somedays a ceramic dish will slip from fingers that nonsensically decide to just fail, splitting as it hits the counter as I curse like an enraged sailor and cry. Because they hurt. Because I cannot trust my own hands not to fail me. Because sometimes they tremble and shake, and I am so young. Not even thirty. Because I am an artist, at my core and in my soul and in a way that makes me weep, and too often I wonder how long I will be able to hold a pen.