Summers with The Redhead

Over the past few years, summers meant spending a week in the Catskills with my grandmother. Since we were living together for the week, I would take the time to interview her for the book. Now I listen to the interviews I have recorded, and I can’t help but laugh. There we were, sitting on the sunny porch, talking about the hardest time in her life, her sharing needed details about how she, along with every other Jew in her town were herded away to the ghetto, but every few moments she interrupted herself to squeal with delight as my baby showed off her crawling skills.

“She is so smart! Look at that, I knew she was so smart! Oh no! She is putting something in her mouth!”

I grabbed the baby, put her on my lap and continued the interview.

“Bobby, but how did you feel when that happened to you?” I asked. “Did it come as a shock? Did you know it was coming? Do you remember how it felt?”

“I remember feeling confused and sad,” she said.

“Gaga,” my baby said, and my grandmother’s face turned from pensive into delight.

“Lichtege gidele!” she said to the baby as past and future, horror, and hope, melted into one moment.

I loved taking her to the pool with me. She sat there and watching my kids splash and play. I loved how she would engage in conversation with everyone who walked by, telling them to, “take care of themselves, you look beautiful, have a lot of mazel.”

I loved how even in her 90s, she would watch my girls in the morning so I could get a few minutes of extra sleep.

I loved how she got all dressed up to go out for lunch with me.

I loved how she got all dressed up to teach me to make kokosh cake.

I loved how when I was going through my Agatha Christie stage, she watched Crooked House with me and predicted whodunit before all of us. “It is the little girl,” she murmured under her breath as we watched. “I knew it!” she said at the end of the movie, finger pointed at us. It had to be her!”

It was only a week, she often didn’t feel well, and she felt frustrated, thinking she held us back. She once told me there is a Hungarian saying about a bird who wants so much to fly but his feathers were too light. That is how she felt, so full of life in her 90s, but with a body that couldn’t keep up. She didn’t realize I wanted nothing more than to stay holed up in the nest with her. I loved spending time with my grandmother in the summers.

Last summer my uncle asked me how I was doing. It had been 2 months since she died, and I was not doing the greatest. I missed her so much it physically hurt.

“Not so good,” I told him and tried to smile.

“It will get easier,” he told me. “You will start to forget.” But that thought horrified me more than the sadness.

“I don’t want to forget,” I told him.

“I know,” he said. “But that is the way it has to be.”

This summer I realized he was right. I am starting to forget her a little bit. Well not her but the details that she was made up of.  I am starting to forget the way it felt like to be with her. I am starting to forget her accent. I am starting to forget the way she smiled. And this makes it less painful to live without her. I know this is a universal experience. And it scares me less than I thought it would.

One of you asked on my Instagram advice for dealing with loss and I am the last one qualified to give advice. I lost my 96-year-old grandmother, the furthest thing from a tragedy, the most natural thing in the world, and yet still I struggled greatly with it. All I was able to tell you was that it felt like one of my favorite characters in my book wasn’t there anymore and I had to continue the story without her. But it is becoming less painful. My story is continuing. New amazing characters are coming in. I have so many pages to fill and I cannot keep flipping back to the old chapters. I know she would be proud of me for doing this.

“Mamashein,” she would say. “You need to take care of yourself.”

And so, when I find myself forgetting, I don’t feel sad that I am. And yet, I know I can never truly forget. When my sister and I went to visit her in rehab, she woke up to us talking to each other. She looked at us, smiled, and shook her head.

“I can never die,” she said. “I love you all too much.”

She poured all her love into us and so the truth is, she could never die. Her love lives on in all of us. Nothing will ever take her away.

She also lives on in the stories we tell. This weekend, I went back up to my mother’s bungalow. This time she wasn’t there but when we got caught in a downpour and had to run back to the bungalow through the rain, I called out to my mother,

“Did Bobby also tell you that rain is good for your complexion?”

When I was a teenager I would walk in the rain with my face to the sky, because my grandmother told me it would make my skin nice. The polluted NYC air did no such thing but if my grandmother told me it did, it was worth a try.

“Of course,” my mother laughed. “And she also told me how she would stand in roll call for hours in Auschwitz while the rain poured down on their emaciated bodies.”

I heard that story so many times before. A rainy day never fazed my grandmother. “This is nothing!” she would always say. “I had to stand there for hours and hours in horrific thunderstorms, wearing nothing but a tiny dress with a rip up its side. The Nazis loved keeping us out, helpless in the rain. Rain can’t hurt me now. I have shelter to go to; I am a queen.”

As I came into the bungalow, sheltered from the pouring rain, I thought of how her stories had me celebrating bad weather. I could never get caught up with petty frustrations of a few raindrops (although there are plenty of other petty things I manage to get caught up with). I don’t even take an umbrella. The weather doesn’t rule me. Because of her stories, I am a queen in the rain.

And then I marveled how I carried her with me, or she carried me with her, through a brief sprint through the rain, two summers after she died.  

Summers mean spending a week with grandma after all.

I am thinking recommending a children’s book, an adult book, and a poem with each of my newsletters. I need another social media platform like I need another hole in my head ( threads I’m looking at you – everyone is soo witty, we get it)  What I want is to take that time to read more books. Let me know in the comments if my recommendations are something you would like.

Also, if this essay resonated with you, let me know in the comments as well. It is nice to know that I am not talking into a void (I am pretty good at doing that though. Yada yada yada).

Here are my recommendations for this month.

Children’s book – THE RABBIT LISTENED by Cori Doerrfeld. I was blown away by this beautiful book on empathy. When something hard happens to Taylor, the help he needs comes in the form of a rabbit who doesn’t leave his side and listens while Taylor works through his sadness The dedication is for “anyone rebuilding” and I thought that is so beautiful.

Book – NO TWO PERSONS by Erica Bauermeister. – This was an enjoyable read, I thought the language was beautiful, it was heartfelt, optimistic and it had me turning pages so that’s a win for me.

Poem –Remember Me by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.