Dear Grandma,
Hey, I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness.
A sort-of brief foreword —
Before Alzheimer’s disease robbed my grandmother—my best friend — and me of our ability to converse in our shared language, we were the dual storytellers of our family. In raising me, she shared a rich oral history of her experiences growing up in the town where I would also grow up a third-generation resident — our sacred shared space.

In the years when language failed us at the temporal lobes, we struggled to learn how to reach each other. When I was brave enough, I was a master weaver of diversions and improvisational fictions—a stranger stanching my grandmother’s sorrow with my kindness; bartering silly tales of adventure for a smile; spinning truth and fiction from the memories we’d shared, now mine alone to carry and arrange as I see fit. When I wasn’t brave, I could stare for hours into my dresser drawer, searching for a shirt she might recognize me in for even a moment — knowing I’d never find a t-shirt imbued with that kind of magic.
I learned how to mourn the living, sometimes with grace; often without. I became a novice apprentice in the magic realism of dementia, a court jester, a magician, a cleric, a bard; I learned how to press pages of earnest prayer, wordlessly, into the paper of our flesh on the days when I squeezed her hand and she squeezed mine back. On the days when she didn’t, I prayed, anyway, and learned how to clench my own sorrow and anger directed at the cruel disease into the tight ball of my fist; to release it only in safe spaces where I was alone, again, with the sunlight hitting my face.
Throughout the process of slow, unwinding grief, in our emotional acrobatics, my grandmother finally taught me how to understand: so long as stories survive, we do.
And so I began to write. I’m still not sure entirely what I’m writing, but every now and then these stories spell my spine straight. I collect every truth and every unanswered question as they come to my memory. I catalog precious myths. I’m practicing the art of leaning into the magic realism of being.
My grandmother laid herself peacefully to rest during the first week of August, 2016.
Prior to that — in the moments when I found myself choking on the gristle bits of grief I was surprised to find in my mouth — I addressed letters to her in the familiar language we used to share. These letters lived in my diary, never to enter our dialogue — a sophomoric sampling of precious myths I wanted to catalog for a time when I could better decipher them and find their flesh.
I re-visited this letter on the eve of what would have been her 88th birthday. I considered re-crafting it into a stanza of its own in the piece I’m slowly chewing and penning, but perhaps some things are best left in the unedited, off-the-cuff-honesty of a hazily-threaded, unsent letter to a dear friend.
June 25, 2015
Dear Grandma,
I was thinking about St. Augustine today and how I miss it, and how I just want to take off and go away. There, maybe, for a quick visit, on the way to somewhere I haven’t been. Somewhere far.
But I think St. Augustine would make me too sad without you. I do think once you go — really, go — Nancy and I will have to take a trip back and do it right; decorate La Fiesta and dress in our tacky Christmas best. And we’ll stroll the Atlantic at night and remember everything about you in our peculiar, laughing way. We’ll do it right: with merriment and cinnamon rolls from The Bunnery.
I may be brave enough to visit you tomorrow, or I may still be hiding from the world. (It’s just been one of those weeks, but I’m okay!) I’m listening to The Weakerthans’ ‘Left and Leaving’ album while I write to you, and a song called ‘Aside’ is playing now — and sometimes I still feel 17, Grandma. That’s what I suppose I mean when I say “It’s just been one of those weeks” — I’m okay. Just feeling a little adolescent.
Anyway.
I was reading the Bradenton Herald tonight. They’re going to tear down your Aunt Julia’s house really soon. The Reasoner House. They call it the Beth Salem House in the Herald, but I’ve always just known it as your “Aunt Julia Reasoner’s”. I’m sorry this is happening. It’s actually what prompted me to sit down and write to you. I can still find a peaceful place to sit with you in letters.
I never knew the Reasoner House was the first house in Bradenton to get a telephone line or indoor plumbing. I just knew it as the place you loved, where when you were a little girl, you spent time on the front porch with your Aunt Julia, and the folks there were kind to you.
I’ve always appreciated a good front porch, and that’s because of you, you know.
I wish I’d had the chance to mention that in the glimmering gift of a moment when you squeezed my hands last month, a few days after Mother’s Day, when I visited you and you were there for a few precious minutes, and I told you every story I could about me and you and us; when I caught you up on my yoga and my joy and my writing and my gratitude to you, for teaching me compassion and resilience and a lifelong lust for learning and imagination. I was all run-on sentences spilling everything I’d been aching to tell you these last few years.
And you kept squeezing my hands and smiling and you were there, Grandma. Right there with me. I know we saw each other in those minutes and I am so grateful.
Maybe I should have told you about about your porch, or Aunt Julia’s, or even mine in one of those breaths, but instead I talked about the Pizza Hut buffet. I’m not sure why I always do that when I’m reaching for you, Grandma, except that I remember there was a Chiclets gum dispenser and a temporary tattoo dispenser in the lobby, and sometimes the most tender memories get muddled, but they matter, and sometimes they squeeze my hands; sometimes they smile. They make me curious about the things that stick.
Anyway.
They’re tearing down Aunt Julia’s house, maybe as soon as June 30, the paper says. I feel like I’ve been grieving that house for years, watching it crumble in neglect across the street from the SR70 Wal-Mart.
Part of me wants to see a wrecking ball take it out of its misery. But when I read articles about it — and when I retroactively realized that two days ago, Tuesday, was probably the last time I would ever drive past it and have those wrecking ball thoughts of mine — my heart nevertheless feels like a sopping washcloth, wrung and wadded.
They’re turning the site into a RaceTrac gras station, by the way. I’m so sorry, Grandma.
…(and me and my anger sit, folding a paper bird)…
Actually.
Me and my anger couldn’t sit still; not when I read that article. Me and my anger chatarunga’ed up and down and up and down on the hardwood floor of my 1920s American Craftsman bungalow — the one I should have described to you with its perfect front porch oasis with plumbago and jasmine and your frangipanis growing all around it. Next time I will.
I wish you could see what I’ve done with it. I try to make it magical. Grandma, I wish I could take you to magical places — ‘faraway places with strange sounding names,’ even — or even just my front porch. Or into my world. Like the old days.
Anyway.
You kept asking, Grandma, while you were squeezing my hands — while I was rambling about yoga and pizza — if I’m doing okay; if I’m happy.
Yes, Grandma. Yes, yes, dear, I am okay. Better than okay. I told you. I promise. I love you. Please don’t forget.
Lots of Love!!
— Jess
P.S.:
The paper also says Snooty got a Guinness World Record! He’s the oldest manatee in captivity, probably the oldest manatee alive, and look at that, he’s finally getting a little recognition for it.
You remembered when you met him when he was a little baby in 1949. When he was kept in a tiny tank at the Pier, where the Chamber of Commerce was when you worked there. Where you visited him on your lunch break and ached for his confinement; loved him from just outside the thick pane of glass between you.
Snooty was born on July 21, 1948, the article says. Three days before your 19th birthday. How surreal everything is, sometimes:
Snooty’s in the Guinness Book of World Records, they’re tearing down Aunt Julia’s house, and me and my anger sit; we do so much yoga. I even taught it this morning.
Who would have thought, Grandma? Who would have thought.
Love,
your proud and strange and so hopelessly hopeful granddaughter
— Jess
P.P.S.:
Snooty’s tank is much bigger, now, and an entire town loves him and he gets all the lettuce he could dream of. Snooty is likely the oldest and definitely the most beloved manatee in the world.
But I wonder sometimes, Grandma, if Snooty is actually happy. All the lettuce he can eat and the love of a city… But 67 years in a tank is all he’s ever known and all he ever will know.
How surreal everything is, Grandma. How surreal.
— — —

P.P.P.S.:
July 2, 2015,
They tore down the Reasoner House yesterday. The paper said it took less than one hour. One hundred-nineteen years.
I drove by today. Sat right in front of it at the red light; watched bulldozers and CAT claws push rubble. I anthropomorphized them in my mind, of course, out of habit: bashful, guilty children shuffling their feet around a shattered bird’s nest sling-shot from the boughs. Humpty Dumpty’s remorseful horse pals and the king’s impotent henchmen nudging the fragments of a yolky mosaic.
Green light, and this time I try to forget.
Some things, I do try to forget.
