10 years of airplanes and cars on Christmas day to greet family members with a hug and a kiss and a “Merry Christmas, we’re so glad you’re here.” I’m always so glad to be walking into a familiar doorway and feeling like I’ve never left.
When you're states away from your family, it turns into a tradition over the first few questions they ask you. “How’s school going? Wait, what year are you in now? You’re growing up so fast. Wow. OK, so, boys?”
I’m a 20-year-old single gal who’s slowly placing the pieces of the mess I made of my room together into this great big art piece that organizes the plan for the rest of my life, and it’s hard to imagine having this mess all in place.
Maybe that’s what we are all doing. We’re all a bunch of twenty-somethings who want to fall in love and create something out of the mess we were handed. We want to have something worth sharing, but we don’t have that yet. This leads to our complaints on social media. We keep tweeting about how our family members are going to ask, “How’s school going? Wait, what year are you in now? You’re growing up so fast. Wow. Okay, so, boys?” We’re just not at this phase of life that’s exciting to talk about. We’re confused and scared and we still don’t fully know how to do our laundry sometimes. We don’t want the questions that make us seem like we need to have this whole thing put together.
My grandmother always seemed like she had this whole thing put together. She always had this napkin and she was constantly wiping off her crumbs she created on the dinner table. My seven-year-old eyes wanted to grow up to be the type of person who was constantly cleaning up the crumbs I made on the table like she did.
She was always laughing, but it wasn’t an actual giggle. She laughed by the way her voice cracked a little bit when she was telling her favorite jokes, and sometimes, when she was really happy, it was followed by a snort.
I keep using the word “was,” which is not entirely fair considering that my grandmother is still here. She’s still dancing and singing on this planet, but the dancing and singing doesn’t happen as often anymore. You see my grandmother was officially diagnosed with vascular dementia a couple of years ago. Vascular dementia is caused by a stroke or many strokes. This disease has caused many of my favorite things about my grandmother to disappear even if she’s still sitting at the Christmas dinner table.
We used to sit up past midnight at the kitchen table with tea and Stella Doro cookies and she would ask me about life. It would start off with all the easy questions, but she made sure to make it go more in depth. We’d talk about our mutual fear of birds and about her angel in the backyard.
We’d talk about how wonderful ice cream will always be to us and I’d make her tell me my favorite joke one last time, hoping I’d remember every word. I never would. I never was able to nail down the tone she made her voice or all the words in her humorous story, but I’d laugh at her laughter and hold on to that snort and the pinkness on her cheek. Our eyes would become weary, but I never wanted to go to bed. I never wanted these moments to end.
Each year I flew back from Georgia to New York, but the time we sat at the kitchen table with tea and Stella Doro cookies withered away every passing year. Eventually, those moments disappeared. They were placed under my bed, wrapped in a bow inside my journals I’ll read once again in a decade or so.
The thing is, I’m going to spend another one of my Christmas’s on an airplane for three hours to go into a house full of people that love me, and they are going to ask me those questions. The same questions you are going to get. The ones that make us frustrated we don’t have our lives fully together yet.
The difference is that I’m going to notice my grandmother in the background because she’s not strong enough anymore to be in the midst of excitement and a lot of different questions. It all confuses her. Eventually, I’m going to walk over, and she’s going to put her left hand on my right arm. She’s going to tell me that I’m beautiful, and I know she’s going to mean it. Maybe, she’ll remember my name, but that’s just something that depends on the day.
She’s going to ask me those questions. The ones we hate. She’s going to ask me those questions every five minutes for the next five days I’m in her presence, and I’m going to soak it in. I’m going to soak in every single moment she cared enough to know a little bit about my life, and I’m going to wish that I was able to tell her more. I’m going to wish that I was able to tell her about my fears and about the dreams that seem so unrealistic, but I can’t anymore. She wouldn’t understand. It might scare her away.
This is what my relationship with my grandmother is going to look like from now on, but how beautiful it is to still have her hand here and to still hear her laughter. To still be able to soak in the fact that she cares enough about it to ask me about my life, even if it’s the same question a million times.
And, maybe, this year, we can put our pride aside, and we can talk about what’s really going on in our lives because, after all, your family is just asking those simple questions because they want to know you.
You should let them know you.
