Shoes

I don’t care about shoes. Maybe it’s because shopping in general is a form of torture for me. Maybe it’s because my feet are different sizes. My collection of footwear is small and unexciting, and that’s how I like it.

But I have this pair of sandals. Teva brand, “Tirra” style, neutral color, size eight. There’s a stain where the super glue seeped through when I tried to affix extra Velcro to make them more snug. Next to the stain are some uneven stitches from when I sewed the Velcro on after the glue immediately failed. They’re a bit dirty and scuffed. Too big for my left foot, but what shoe isn’t?

I ordered these sandals on Amazon last summer because a few months before that, I had lazily mentioned that I wanted to see New York City before I died and Jeremy took that whim and ran with it. He planned a whole, delightful—and childless!—trip for us. While he researched airlines and hotels and Tonight Show tickets and Uber and restaurants, I researched walking shoes. My feet had failed me before, so I knew I needed something better than a Payless special to carry me all over Manhattan. I needed some serious arch support.

I also knew that for something this important, I should go into an actual store and try shoes on. But knowing and doing are two very different things for me. Click, click, done.

When a brown box arrived on my porch a few days later, I nervously put the sandals on, awaiting disappointment. Once the straps were tightened I stood up and looked down. They looked like nothing much, but they felt like a hug. A miracle.

So off we went. These were the only shoes I brought, except for those dressier black things that saw me through a couple of Broadway shows. These are the sandals that carried me onto the Staten Island Ferry, that squished their way through Central Park in the rain while everyone else took out ponchos and umbrellas and the two of us just soaked it all in. These are the sandals that walked among the graves at Trinity Church, that took me into that little shop with the heavenly peach gelato in Greenwich Village. These are the sandals I kicked off in satisfaction at the end of every day, feeling at once guilty for leaving my babies home and giddily happy I did.

These are also the shoes I frantically lifted up off the floor in that frenzied moment of deep human connection that can only occur when strangers on a crowded subway are confronted with the world’s largest ride-hitching cockroach.

That five-day wonder of a vacation ended, as vacations do. I’m back in the land of strip malls and minivans and school schedules and bedtimes. But I brought back a few souvenirs: a menu from Katz’s Deli. A square magnet clip that says “The Tour at NBC Studios.” And I’ve still got these shoes.

Now when I’m pushing a squeaky cart through Walmart, I can look down at my sandals and imagine I’m climbing the steps of the New York public library, passing under those great stone archways, and mentally planning how to uproot our lives so I can live the rest of my days within walking distance of this building.

Now when I’m dragging our smelly green garbage can to the curb, I can glance at these sandals and be back in that echoey stairwell, marching with Jeremy up the last eight floors to the top of the Empire State Building, laughing because we’re still young enough to do it, knowing we won’t always be.

Now when I’m stuck in some line that won’t move, I can go back to that dreamlike moment in a sweltering underground subway stop. Sweat drips down my back as a couple of guitar strummers belt out my new favorite version of “Rock Me, Mama.” Men with briefcases look up from their phones, women twirl and laugh in a circle nearby, and my husband stands next to me, smiling. I’m surprised by the unexplainable rush of love I feel for the whole of humanity. My toe taps in time with the beat.

One time I strapped on some sandals and stepped outside of my life for a minute, and now that minute will always be mine. I think I’ll hold onto these old sandals too, because sometimes the memory of a thing can be just as sweet as the thing itself.

Hold On

My eleventh grade English teacher showed us clips from the movie Dead Poets Society. The scenes she chose were somewhere in the middle of the movie; I’m sure we were learning about Whitman or Shakespeare and she wanted us to see Robin Williams recite these works in his attention-grabbing way. But the class discussion afterward inevitably turned to a scene she hadn’t shown us—the shocking event that occurs at the end of the film.

I remember our teacher walking to the front of the room and standing in silence for a moment before launching into a seemingly impromptu, impassioned plea to her teenage students to not use this film as an example of how to handle our problems. This character, she said, felt he had no way out, no options but to end his own life. But that conclusion was a lie, a permanent solution to a temporary problem. There is hope, she said. There is always help. Please reach out to someone if you’re feeling this way, she urged, her voice trembling. Do not end your lives before they’ve really even begun. Promise me.

I doodled flower shapes on the cover of my binder as her speech stretched out a little too long. Vicarious embarrassment, which had always seized me when someone got too emotional, too real, prevented me from looking at her. I snuck some glances at my classmates, thinking this display was a bit over the top. We get it, of course we know! No one in that room would ever do such a thing. It was just a tactic in a sad movie, or a news report from somewhere far away. It would never happen here.

And as far as I know, it didn’t. Not among those kids, not back then.

Last night I said goodnight to my twelve-year-old daughter and turned to leave her room. She chose that moment to open up about her day, telling me they got to play games in math the whole time, and that they didn’t learn any science because the school counselor took over the entire class period.

“He talked about suicide prevention,” she said. “He told us what to say if our friends talk about killing themselves, and what questions we should ask them, and what details we should find out. He told us we could be mini counselors for them but also we should tell someone.”

As I listened I felt that old protective reflex that I always have with her, my young and sensitive girl. I want to shield her from ugliness, from the sadness of others that seems to seep inside her and stay when she hears bad news. I wanted to hear more about these math games, not discuss teen suicide. She’s in the seventh grade. Does she really need coaching on such a heart-clutching, world-ending subject?

I pushed the reflex aside for once and asked my girl more questions. Because yes, she does need coaching. And so do I.

Twelve years ago when I lay on the delivery table, stretched and shaking to my core, and the nurse placed my pink, squalling daughter on my chest, my heart began to break. I didn’t know it then, but that first crack would only grow larger as she did, as I dreamed about her face, as my identity became tied up in her, as I learned her every part by heart and ached with newfound vulnerability.

Then came a baby boy, and my heart split wider and I clung to him, couldn’t stop kissing his beautiful cheeks, and he loved without reserve and the world went on while sad, hopeless things happened all around us. The specter of loss hovered right outside the door. But still, here came another girl, a screaming force of energy with clear blue eyes that stun and a grip on my heart that crumbles walls. And now here I am exposed, wound up in a tangle of pain and fear and love that all feel like the very same thing.

Because there are mothers in my town today whose sanctuaries have been shattered by the loss that is always waiting in my peripheral vision. There are mothers with sons they adore, sons with the brightest of futures, sons with some deep, gaping need inside who never told their mothers they were sad, never said they needed help, never gave the slightest warning, never will be coming back. What could they have done, these mothers? This question plagues my waking hours. What could they do? What can I do?

I know a girl who loves to draw, who is quiet but wants to star in plays, who feels things deeply; a boy who loves the rush of the wind on his face as he soars downhill on his scooter, who has already started to wonder if he’s good enough; a girl with fire in her eyes who rests her freckled cheek against my arm and cries about losses too big for her six tiny years. I say I know these children because I don’t really have them, can’t hold onto them the way I want to. The way they have a hold on me.

I went for a run today. I thought about those mothers (will never stop thinking about those mothers) and here came that stinging behind my eyes, that painful throbbing lump in my throat. The lump grew and grew as I ran, made my hands shake, pushed its way upward. And then it rushed out of my mouth, a sudden noise, a strangled cry that wasn’t me but really was. The truest me. I used to wonder why crying made my throat hurt, but now I know. It’s not so much the crying that brings that burning ache, but the trying so hard not to.

The Story of My Beginning, as told (so many times) by my grandma, the last of the Ones Who Were There

For all of my life, this story has lived down the street, or in the next city, or one phone call away. It was always nearby, ready to make an appearance at the slightest provocation, filling my ears and my space like a smell you don’t notice until it’s gone. It was there even when I didn’t know I wanted it. I’ve learned by now that I can’t keep my people from slipping away, but their words? Our stories? Maybe if I reach, I can pull this one back down to earth and anchor it fast. Maybe I can make it stay.

Well, you know, they were over here on Christmas Day, and your mom was so big, and so miserable, and she felt like she was going to go into labor. But she just kept praying that you would wait another day, because she wanted you to have your own day. She didn’t want your birthday to be on Christmas. So we sat and did puzzles and played games and just waited. Oh, Susan was so miserable.

She was sure she’d go into labor overnight, so they left Michael here with us that night, ya, just to be safe. You know, he wasn’t even one yet, and I couldn’t believe she was already having another one. But we’re sure glad she did, aren’t we? Yes, we are, Amy. I wanted her to wait but if she’d waited it might not have been you. But anyway, then she was back the next morning, and nothing had happened. So we sat around and played more games and then the contractions started. And she would just breathe through them but they were coming closer. But your dad, you know, had to go to work and she didn’t know which site he went to. You know, this was before cell phones, and his work sites didn’t have any phones so we didn’t know where he was. She called his boss Rob but couldn’t get ahold of him, so I sent Boyd out driving all over Utah County looking for Raymond. And I took your mom to the hospital.

And your dad made it in time. He made it there and I waited out in the waiting room. And then when it was over and they wheeled her out on the bed, I’ll never forget this, I took her hand and her face was so relieved and she says, “Mom, it doesn’t have a birthmark!” The first thing she said. It, she called you. So I says, “It? What is it?” and she says, “It’s a girl and there’s no birthmark! She just has a club foot!” And I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t known she was so worried about a birthmark, but you know Michael was born with that bright red birthmark all up and down his arm and it’s faded now, it got a lot better, ya, but she used to worry so much about that, and little kids would ask her why her baby had jam on his arm and it used to bother her. So she had been worried that the next one would have it all over the face. But you didn’t.

But anyway I couldn’t believe it when she said, “All it has is a club foot.” My heart just sank at that because you know Boyd’s mother had a club foot and she used to limp so bad all her life. And when I saw your little foot I just felt sick with worry. I mean, you should have seen it, the heel all up touching the back of your leg, and your foot all turned in wrong. I didn’t think the doctors could do anything. But your mom didn’t care, she said you were so beautiful and perfect. And then the doctors did fix it. Oh, you had to have a couple of surgeries and I felt so bad, you learning how to walk with that big old cast holding your leg straight. And you used to get so fussy about those casts and they itched, and your mom would stick a bottle in your mouth to calm you down and that’s how you got so chubby back then, you know. Ya, but what could she do? And you had those corrective shoes with that bar you had to wear at night, and it was hard, you know, with your mom taking care of two babies and your dad working so much. But she’d bring you guys over here a lot and she made it through and your leg got fixed.

And you know, one of those doctors told me if you had been born only twenty years earlier they couldn’t have made your foot as good as it is, that’s how new the surgery was. So you were blessed to have that. And look at you! You walk so normal. And you can run! I thought you’d never run. Sure, if you look at your legs together side by side the left one looks skinnier and you do have that scar in the back but it could have been so much worse. Ya, you’re lucky, you know, Amy Sue. And you don’t have a birthmark all over your face. That would have been harder to fix, I think. But just look at you now. 

Funeral Talk

Grandma has been telling me for maybe twenty years that I’ll be speaking at her funeral. As the years went by she had a list of questions she liked to ask me over and over (these included, “Have you met any nice boys yet? Are you trying to meet nice boys? Have you had those moles checked recently?”), but perhaps her favorite question was, “Have you written my funeral talk yet?” I’d always say, “No, Grandma, I haven’t. You’ll just have to give me more time.” So she did. She kept giving me more and more time and I kept on not writing it. This arrangement was working out nicely, I thought. I really liked it.

This last week as I thought about giving this talk, I realized that everything I want to say about Grandma I’ve already said to her, in a letter I gave her this past Christmas. So maybe this is the easy way out, but no, Grandma, I haven’t written your funeral talk yet. I hope this will do instead.

Dear Grandma,

I recently read an article about how a mother and her baby can exchange cells through the placenta during pregnancy. These cells remain in the other person long after birth and separation, so they each carry a piece of the other for the rest of their lives. Conceivably, the mother could pass on cells from her mother, so the child carries living evidence of her grandmother inside of her.

I believe it.

You are inside me.

How could you not be? My earliest days were full of you. Before I knew words I knew your voice. You held me close as you spoke with your firstborn—my mother—and my newborn neurons fired in rhythm with the back-and-forth of your steady conversation.

Then I grew, and you stayed, and you filled me up with memories that make me who I am.

You are in my head.

You are summer swamp coolers and raspberries, a blanket on the lawn and evening weed-pulling parties. You are winter divinity and chip dip, Sunday night visits with German chocolate cake. You’re a picnic on the Fourth of July, my first stop on Halloween, a turkey-shaped peanut cup at Thanksgiving. You are Santa Claus, Grandma, with your round, happy cheeks and those bright, twinkly eyes that fill up and spill over when we all sing “Star Bright” in your gold-carpeted living room.

You are quick trips to the fabric store, the hum of a sewing machine, the murmur of words through pursed lips holding straight pins while you hem up my new Easter dress. You are laughter and worries and flying gossip as heads bend over jigsaw puzzles and I stay quiet, listening to the grownups talk and searching for that one perfect piece. You are declarations of my brilliance when I finally click two puzzle pieces together. You are praise and support and belief and unending loyalty.

You are in my heart.

You are unafraid of feelings, good and bad, while my default is to hide and ignore unpleasantness. You are open and frank and you’re brave. You’re the person I think of now when my children are sad or scared and I don’t know how to help. “What would Grandma say?” I ask myself, and then I stumble through.

You are the voice waiting in the phone when I can’t be alone with myself any longer. You listen to my throat-aching silence and you know just what it means. You have talked me through pre-marriage jitters and hormonal upheavals and motherhood angst and impending loss. You tell me things about myself I didn’t know. Your voice weaves through my head and holds up my heart.

You know what else, Grandma? You are grit. You are determined endurance through faulty lungs and aching hips and failing legs and a heart that has had almost enough. You are faith despite unfairness and grief. You are action in times of crippling despair.

You are love. Even in the face of ingratitude. You are love, even when your love seems to be dismissed. You are love and acceptance even through disagreements and differences.

Finally, you are rescue. You were standing, with open arms, when my world fell down around me. I will always treasure that image of you, and the feeling of being wrapped in your strong, lingering hug with the quiet tickle of your voice in my ear, buoying me up with a love that will always last.

You’re inside me, Grandma. And I’m so glad you always will be.

Love,

Amy Sue

I’m going to miss my grandma. She often said in recent years that she wasn’t good for anything, stuck in that chair, unable to go places, unable to host parties like she wanted to. But she was good for so much. I have so many emails of encouragement and hand-written cards from her. I have a beautiful quilt on my bed that she made for our wedding, and a thick and intricate afghan she gave me for high school graduation. We still have the blankets she gave my children when they were born. These are pure expressions of her love, and that love doesn’t just die. I can pull it tight and warm around me and it will stay until I someday see her again.

I’m so thankful I had such a grandmother. I’m thankful she fought and stayed for so long. I’m thankful for the promises of life after death and forever families.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Lois Anne

She was born deep in the spring of 1940, the time of year when green has come to life and the trees are filled with song. She lived a whole big life before I got to meet her—sixty-three years later—when her youngest son drove me north one wintry weekend and showed me into the living room of his childhood home. She was elderly by then, burdened with health issues, fragile on her flowered couch. But her warmth rose up to greet me and my nervousness dissolved. Later that night she called Jeremy “my Stew-baby” as he put his hand on her shoulder in the kitchen and, with his other hand, retrieved some dishes stored far above her head. He laughed.

“I think I’m really in this now,” I told my roommate when I came back into town. “I mean, you should see how he is with his mom.”

We made that northbound trip again and again, her son and I, and she was always waiting at the end of it. Soon enough we brought a baby with us, then another, and then another. She took our children into her arms and she was theirs. Every sound they made was precious to her, every little trick ingenious. She poured out adoration and they lapped it up like puppies.

Our children learned that visits to Grandma’s house meant hours of uncommon attention. She gave them crayons and colored with them at the bar while they watched cartoons together on the little kitchen TV. She handed out butterfly nets at the family campsite and exclaimed over the specimens they ran back to show her. Once she lowered herself down to the floor and helped our daughter make a horse corral out of Lincoln Logs. The getting back up wasn’t so easy.

Always she offered snacks and drinks. She poured grape juice into Tupperware tumblers and taught the kids to click their cups together and say, “Cheers to your big ears!”

Our usually stoic oldest daughter surprised us time and again in those early days by dissolving into tears when it was time to drive home. We had to coax her into the car as she said goodbye, promising her we would come back soon. She’d cry for the first thirty minutes of the trip.

Sometimes we would talk on the phone, my mother-in-law and I, in those quiet and endless afternoons of early motherhood when I felt like I might disappear. I could talk of nothing but these children who consumed me, and she listened eagerly to every detail, marveling at their cleverness, laughing at their quirks. “You’re such a good mom, Amy Lynne,” she’d say, and I’d feel my eyes start to sting.

Because always there came the thought—She’s old and getting older. I’d catch myself trying not to get too close. This will not last forever. Many times I’d watch her with the kids and feel a stab of future sorrow. How will they stand it when she’s gone? Not an ideal way to look at life, it’s true, but when death has walked right through your front door, it’s hard not to expect it back at any moment.

But still we visited and still she loved and the children grew and changed. Our youngest daughter was suddenly tall enough to reach the button on Grandma’s wall clock, so she’d push it over and over and dance across the living room to a music-box version of “Hey Jude” while Grandma clapped and cheered from the couch.

On random Sunday evenings, Jeremy would announce, “I’m gonna call my momma!” and take the phone into the bedroom. Soon his laughter would float down the hall and the kids would all end up on the bed with him, waiting for their turn to talk.

We brought her flowers in the spring and celebrated her birthday and Mother’s Day on the deck behind her daughter’s house, while the sun shone down and her progeny laughed and the green leaves danced with the light.

She’d sometimes be in the hospital and I’d pray and hold my breath. And then she’d be back home and send us birthday cards. “I love you more than all the birds in the sky,” she wrote to our animal-obsessed daughter. “I love you more than all the squirrels in the trees.”

And then September happened, much too soon. The feared future came to meet us and Jeremy and I found ourselves giving our kids the talk I’d been dreading since they first gazed into their grandmother’s eyes. Her days were almost done. They did not take it well.

Another drive up north. Cars were parked outside the house. Our oldest daughter did not hurry up the steps and through the door as she had so many other times. She sat sullenly in the car while I followed the others in to find a hospital bed in the living room, next to the flowered couch. There she lay, weakened and failing but oh-so-happy to be home. We circled her while she cracked her jokes and loved us with her eyes. Our son handed her a crayoned card. It said, “I hope you have a good time. I will never, never, ever forget you.”

Only after much cajoling did our daughter come inside to say goodbye.

I never got to know my mother-in-law when she was young and energetic. But I look at photos and hear the stories her son tells, and there she is as clear as day, accompanying him on the piano as he sings his Kermit the Frog solo in choir class; softly admiring every rock he finds for her on his walk home from elementary school; caring for her lilacs and drinking in the scent as though she’ll never get enough.

I see the way her son loves his children and I know I am looking at her. I see her kindness in his eyes as he nurtures me in ways I never knew I needed. I hear her voice in his love for music and his genuine interest in people.

I’ve seen him now another way, this man brought to a tender halt as he catches the scent of his first spring without her in it. For those she left, it hurts to see that the world can still hold lilacs but not her.

And yet. The children remember. They look at her picture and miss her out loud and their hearts melt for music and furry things. They twirl and chase bubbles across the greenest grass, and there she is, there she is.

Routine

I bought her an alarm clock for Christmas. Not just any alarm clock, though, a kind of orb that glows rainbow colors and connects to your iPod so you can wake up to the music of your choice. This is it, I thought, now I’ll finally make her get up on her own and she’ll start to learn responsibility. A promise to her, to myself.

And yet. Here it is March and still I heave myself out of bed, eyes stinging, every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, the first one awake in a silent house. I stumble down the hall, through the cluttered kitchen, and down the brown-carpeted stairs toward her deep and purple den. I dread the next few moments.

“Wake up time!” I chirp obnoxiously, and I gently shake her bundles of blankets. She groans, rolls over, away from the soft turquoise light of the alarm clock that has never been set to alarm. “C’mon, get up! You don’t want to miss band!” Inside I’m ashamed, not wanting to fail her and knowing I am.

I can’t go upstairs and start breakfast or she’ll sink right back down to her dreams. I sit on her bed, bounce her up and down, sing silly songs, start to get stern. Finally she sits, slowly moves her feet to the floor, stands with her eyes closed like a rumpled member of the preteen undead.

We trudge up the stairs together, mother and daughter. I should give her more credit, I chide myself for the hundredth time. Back away, leave her to learn what it’s like to be late. Let her stumble her way into teenager-hood, gain some independence. After all, I had to do it alone.

Shouldn’t I make her do more of it alone?

“Mom, will you brush my hair for me?” she mumbles, and I automatically pick up the brush. Pull it through the tangled ends, fist grasped firmly to hold handfuls away from her sensitive scalp. I don’t want to hurt her.