Stories are memories are feelings

My Grandmother died yesterday. This is the first thing I’ve written since and I’m wondering to myself, are there stories better than the ones she told? Last time- that is the last time I saw her (which was ages ago now)- we huddled around her bed and cooed over the pictures on her night table. One was of her at the age of three: black and white, dusty Alabama road. She stood next to another little girl, pigtails on the both of them and a wooden horse between.

“What a lovely picture,” my partner said, somewhat obseqiuously. Dottie rolled her eyes.

“You see her?” she asked, pointing to the second child. We nodded, tilting our heads and grinning like aww isn’t that sweet a little friend how cute.

“She’s STILL a bitch!” Dottie shouted. Woman could hold a grudge.

Maybe my worldview was most affected by reading the kinetic freshness of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in college, or maybe when I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and felt language like a marrow-tap, like...really deep. I mean, it could have been Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy, but I’d rather not dive into that here. Sometimes it feels like I’m swimming in all of these texts. I found myself, just now, looking at my bookshelf and asking, “Where are they? The stories? The ones that made me this?”

I mean, it’s all cumulative, right? Probably sometimes I’m sitting anxiously waiting in a busy emergency room and think of an Elena Ferrante character stuffing her meatballs with shards of glass. Or maybe I’m out on a cold day in winter, the wind burning my ears, and imagine being on the run and falling in love across the tundra, like in Left Hand of Darkness. Visions of the future and the past and the present; they all get blended up in my memories of reading. I’ll say that just now, my Grandmother’s stories cut sharply through the rest. Maybe because she loved me and probably because she died. But anyway: All of it’s me. And memory. And grief and love.