A prose poem, by Milly Lou Edward
There, at the bottom of the list, a voicemail dated March 12, 2018. It’s 19 seconds long. I’m terrified I’ll one day accidentally delete it, and so I never hit play. But when I do, when the temptation of hearing her speak one last time becomes too great, my ear is filled with the sound of her raspy voice. I can see the safron curls atop her head. The floral button down shirts. The teal, silicone bracelet. The rows and rows of books. The bowl of M&Ms on the coffee table. The cancer pamphlet beside them.
I hear her raspy voice in my own sometimes. I fight to clear it, wishing for the smooth sultry sound of someone else. Someone more radiant, more enchanting. And then I remember, it’s my grandmother I want to suppress. My grandmother, with her sagging skin and short stature. It was a running joke in my family that she, and her mother, and my mother would say hmm often. In response to things. To fill the silence. Hmm. I swore I would never do it, never make that small sound so constantly in the way my grandmother and mother did. Later, it would seem to me that I had been among thinkers. Women whose brains were running at millions of miles per second, pondering everything, debating the world in the confines of their minds. But I grew up, and grandma died. Not long ago, I began making that sound myself. It comes from me so often now, when I least expect it. When I'm thinking, questioning. Hmm. I feel terrible for making fun of her when it was only ever a sign of her intelligence.
Some people fade slowly, but not my grandmother. I’ve since watched my grandfather turn to breathing dust before me, a decade of slipping away into something else, despite his blood still pumping. He stopped being himself long before his time finally came. But my grandmother, no, she just continued on living into 80 years old as if she were no more than 50. I watched her change from the slim, cigarette smoking red headed old lady of my childhood, into a sick woman who wanted everyone to see her bald head after chemotherapy, and then into a survivor. Come here, she said, touch it, and bent her head down towards me to feel the little grayish hairs coming out of her scalp. They were soft. And she recovered as if cancer had been nothing but the common cold. She had been alert up until her last days with us, her hair grown back out and once again dyed red.
Today I played the voicemail again. I listened to it often after she passed, but it hurt too much, and I now chose instead to forget it exists within the files of my cell phone. But now and then, on days like today, I come across it and decide to hit play. Grandma says to me, Hey Em, I hope everything is okay. Call me back, okay? The day comes flooding back to me. I was on her side of town and wanted to visit her for coffee. She didn’t answer, I didn’t leave a message. But I was driving when she called back, and so a message was left for me instead. My grandmother, who I’d never been bothered to visit on my own before, only ever dragged there against my wishes by my mother and forced to sit in her uncomfortable dining chairs listening to them talk about work and church and the neighborhood and everything I didn’t care about, thought that I was calling because something was wrong.
I haven’t forgiven myself for that. For avoiding her so much. The cigarettes and then the cancer and then the oldness were too disagreeable for me. I preferred to play in the yard or do my homework on visits to Grandma’s house. Any excuse I could use to get away from her during these times, I took. And so the price I pay is the shame I feel when I hear the only relic left, that one small clip of her voice that remains, and know that she never expected me to want to visit. She knew I did not like to see her. Here she had endured abusive men, a teenage pregnancy, ovarian and lung cancer. Four children. Divorce. Working in a school cafeteria. All for her 21-year-old granddaughter to have no desire to see her. If I were in her place, I would have had to wonder why. What about me was so unappealing to my granddaughter that she avoided me so much? Was it my home? The way I spoke to her? The topics of conversation? Was it the way I looked? The real me can never apologize and say, it was not your fault.
The Christmas before she passed away, my grandmother mailed me a card. Inside was twenty dollars and her name written in pen. The paper was strong and white, blue sparkles all over the envelope. I mailed one back, nothing special, just something I dug out of a box in the loft. In it I wrote to tell her thank you, and that I hoped to see her soon when she was feeling better, as she was in and out of the hospital. My grandmother did not call me, but instead called my mother, who would later tell me that I was the only granddaughter to write her a letter back. Still, the dread fills me. Despite my second and last effort, she still thought I did not want to hear her voice. Her raspy, aged sound. I can only hope that it brought her, however small, a piece of joy in knowing I did care.
It’s cruel, the way that beautiful, intelligent people are placed into our lives at times that we are unable, or unwilling, to appreciate them. If only the chance were still there, I would sit by the fire with her and listen to her tell story after story. I would write it all down, everything about her mother and her grandmother. I would drink her coffee even if it was a little burnt. I would be there to pour her cup. Instead, I live with the guilt that I never was a good granddaughter, or even an average one. And she has died thinking I did not have any reason to call beyond emergency.
Only one granddaughter helped carry her coffin, and it wasn’t me. I stood to the side, consoling my heartbroken mother in our black dresses. My sister wept on the other side of her. The first pang of guilt had hit me then, when I thought that I could have very well carried it when I was offered. But I had declined. Out of fear that I could not hold the weight, or disinterest in serving my grandmother with one final act, I don’t know. And in the years since, the shame, the regret, it has only grown stronger and stronger. I cannot call her back to tell her everything is fine, I just want to come over. I cannot put my textbooks back in my bag, sit down at the uncomfortable dinner table, and listen to my matriarchs talk. I have lost my chance at visiting her in the hospital, of supporting her through her two cancer diagnoses. And in exchange, I will not ever know of forgiveness.
