I was able to put a finer point on this feeling when my grandmother died. I was fourteen. I had recently colored my hair and bought a satin tube top, a transition I considered to be evidence of irreversible maturity. I showed up to my last visit with my grandmother in rich brown lipstick and a slim collarless coat, bought on sale at Banana Republic. I painted my dying grandmother’s fingernails carefully with a pearlescent polish by Wet n Wild and promised to return for lunch the next day. But there was no next day: she died late that night, my father by her side. The following morning, when he recounted her passing to us, was the first and last time I saw him cry.
Until I was about twelve my grandmother was my best friend. Carol Marguerite Reynolds—Gram, as I called her—was in possession of a swirling bob of snow-white hair and only one eyebrow, a result of a lack of UV awareness. She was in the habit of drawing on the missing one with a gray-blue Maybelline pencil that didn’t even begin to suggest natural hair growth. She wore pants from the maternity store to accommodate her distended belly and the kind of practical shoes that have, in recent years, become fashionable in Brooklyn. Her house smelled of mothballs, baby powder, and a loamy moistness that emanated from her overstuffed basement. I called her every day at 4:00 P.M.
On the surface, she was traditional. Provincial even. A retired real-estate agent in Old Lyme, Connecticut, with a passion for Dan Rather and a freezer full of cheap London broil, she wasn’t particularly interested in our life in the city. (In fact, I only remember her visiting once, an event I was so excited for that I put out the milk for tea at 10:00 A.M., and it spoiled by her 4:00 P.M. arrival.) But the trappings of her domestic life hid what I now see was the soul of a radical. After attending a one-room schoolhouse in a town full of swamp Yankees—her family had been the first of their neighbors to have a car, which they drove across the frozen lake in winter—she had fled her sheltered life for Mount Holyoke College, Yale nursing school, and then the army, where she was stationed in Germany and Japan suturing wounds and removing shrapnel from German soldiers despite strict orders to let them die. She dated doctors (some of them Jews!) and adopted a dachshund named Meatloaf she’d found rummaging through the trash behind her tent.
Gram recounted her adventures with Plymouth Rock stoicism, but it was clear to me, even as a nine-year-old, that she’d seen far more than she was willing to discuss.
Gram didn’t marry until she was thirty-four, which, in 1947, was the equivalent of being Liza Minnelli on her fifth gay husband. My grandfather, also named Carroll, was massively obese and came from great wealth, which he had squandered on a series of misguided investments including a chicken farm and a business that sold “all-in-one sporting cages.” But Gram saw something in him, and within two weeks they were engaged. From this union came my father and his brother, Edward, aka Jack.
The day after Gram died, my father and I drove up to her house one last time, and I listened to Aimee Mann on a Discman and watched the industrial landscape pass by. This drive had been a fixture of my childhood: abandoned hospitals and train tracks, signs for towns that didn’t live up to their names, a stop in New Haven for pizza and gas. This, I remember thinking, is the end. Nothing had ever ended before.
As my father and Uncle Jack organized Gram’s things in preparation to sell her house, I wandered the halls in her bathrobe, her crumpled tissues still in the pockets, wailing. They kept working, seemingly immune to the magnitude of the occasion.
“I can’t believe she saved all these fucking receipts,” my father hissed. “There’s canned soup in the cellar from 1965.”
“She was just here!” I shouted at the unfeeling adults. “And now she’s gone! Her things are still in the REFRIGERATOR!”
When I emerged from the bathroom smelling her comb, my uncle took my father aside and asked him to please make me stop.
Enraged by the request, I retreated to her closet and switched to sniffing her pajamas. My head throbbed with questions. Where is Gram? Is she conscious? Is she lonely? And what does this all mean for me?
The rest of the summer was characterized by a kind of hot terror, a lurking dread that cast a pallor over everything I did. Every ice pop I ate, every movie I watched, every poem I wrote, was tinged with a sense of impending loss. Not of another loved one but of my own life. It could be tomorrow. It could be eighty years from tomorrow. But it was coming for us all, and I was no exception.
So what were we playing at?