Here At Home

Originally published at https://www.dreamerswriting.com on December 31, 2019.

When my grandmother died, my mother reported that her last words were: “Is that all?”

Although I was not present at her death, I doubted this. I was only 13-years-old and thus not allowed at the end, but I was skeptical. My grandmother could barely talk the last time I’d seen her, nearly a week before her death from cancer. Also, my grandmother was fanciful and soft. She was child-like. She turned empty oatmeal canisters into toys, had drawers full of string cut from bakery boxes “just in case” and taught me to press violets in the pages of favorite books. My grandmother was not a sad-last-words kind of person.

I eventually asked my mother about these last words, careful not to sound doubtful. My mother was quite unlike my grandmother. Although she’d be frequently silly and sometimes playful, she was not dreamy and gentle. I feared a grief-propelled response. But the sharp retort never came. She gulped out an answer, “I think she was sad she never got to Ireland.”

My grandmother’s parents were both Irish immigrants, who lived in neighboring counties of now-Northern Ireland. But they didn’t meet until they were in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the 1880s. My grandmother talked as though she’d lived there. Both her parents had strong brogues and traces were in her speech. She sang Irish songs, listened to Irish music, served cake on plates brought from “home.”