Something To Remember Her By

"When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out.
We want to believe it was all like that."

-- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Antique engagement ring 12-26-14

"Remembrance restores possibility to the past,

making what happened incomplete

and completing what never was."

-- Giorgio Agamben, 

Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

One of my grandmothers lived to be 102 years old.

The other died when she was only 58.

I have copious experiences and objects and photographs by which to remember the one.

I have precious little by which to remember the other -- a wooden crucifix with a plastic Jesus, a single sepia-toned photograph of her and my grandfather with my own father as a newborn, and a scant handful of childhood memories. 

I've always wished for more. In the brief time we had together, I felt a strong connection to my father's mother. Her name was Alice. We hit it off. We did simple things together. She wasn't a fancy lady or a society dame. She was plain and quiet. She had heart trouble, so she kept things pretty low-key. 

She made perfect rhubarb pie and always had Dr. Pepper in the fridge and ribbon candy in a jar. 

The only toys in her house were leftovers she'd saved from when my Dad was a boy, things that seemed exotic and strange -- my favorite was a kaleidoscope. 

We played a lot of Old Maid. 

When we walked to the corner store, she'd buy me an enormous molasses cookie to eat on the way home. She'd hand the grocery bag over to me and ask me to carry "the whole kit and caboodle." 

She kept geraniums in paper bags in back of a dark closet to replant in the spring. 

I remember sitting on her lap waiting for my parents to bring my baby sister home from the hospital.

I was six or seven when she died. She'd pulled the shades and laid down on the sofa for her afternoon nap. A close neighbor noticed the shade was still drawn past the usual time, and went over to check on things. She'd died peacefully in her sleep, of heart failure.

She was buried in a baby blue dress.

While visiting my mother a couple of days ago, she scuttled me up to her bedroom with a clandestine whisper. She had something for me, she said.

She knelt on the floor and pulled out a wooden box from the bottom drawer of the nightstand on my Dad's old side of the bed. In it were a few old bits of jewelry, including my grandmother's engagement ring.

It's a delicate little antique ring from the late '30s, with a tiny speck of a diamond set in filigreed white gold smoothed from 20 years of wear. 

It might fetch a couple of hundred dollars on eBay, but I don't really think it's worth a whole lot, monetarily speaking.

But my breath kind of caught when my mother pressed it into hand.

My mother is at a stage in her life when she is offloading cargo -- giving her daughters particular items of family significance that she thinks we'll appreciate and care for. 

I am honored that my Mom chose to give this particular trinket to me.

I think she knows that I had a special connection with my grandmother. I even look like her. I have her nose and her chin. I have her over-sized hands. I have her rangy angularity. Her bony features.

I make a pretty damn good rhubarb pie myself.

I'm not a sentimental person, and I don't go all smushy-wooshy for family heirlooms. But receiving this particular object definitely tugged at a little something in my heart.

It's good to have a little touchstone. It's good to have something to remember her by.