For months, no one or nothing could penetrate her grief. I was too young at the time to truly understand her despair, but I never forgot what she said when she finally came back to herself.
Dad got a new job, one that required him to work one weekend a month. By that time, my grandfather had been gone over a year. Not wanting me left at loose ends, Dad sent me to Nan.
The first few weekends I was bored out of my mind. Then one Saturday morning she woke me up early, took me out for breakfast, then spoiled me rotten at the craft store. Up and down the aisles we walked. If I even looked sideways at something, she bought it.
When we came home, flushed with excitement, I followed her upstairs to her bedroom with my haul. Sitting cross-legged on the wedding ring quilt she had stitched by hand, I spread out my purchases and told her my plans. “What do you think, Nan?”
“You can do anything you set your mind to, pet.”
I looked up to find her sitting at her vanity, the one she’d long since given to me, with her head cocked to the side, studying her reflection.
And I studied her.
“Time to write a different story,” she murmured.
Leaning closer to the mirror, she smoothed her long-forgotten lipstick over a mouth that had taken on a decidedly downward turn over the past year and a half.
“Hm. This won’t do at all.” Straightening her spine, she smiled at herself in the mirror.
I giggled. “What are you doing, Nan?”
Her eyes met mine in the mirror, the twinkle I’d missed flashing for just a moment. “I’m out of practice, pet. I seem to have lost a wee bit of my smile.”
I nodded sagely. “You’ve been sad.”
Her eyes glossed over as she looked through time. “Very sad, pet.”
“Are you better now, Nan?” I looked at her anxiously, my chest tight and achy. “Is your heart not broken anymore?”
Her eyebrows rose. “Sure, won’t it always be broken? That doesn’t mean I can’t write a new story.” She swallowed and ducked her head for a moment before meeting my eyes in the reflection. “A different kind of story.”
“With me, Nan?” I had just gotten her back, and selfishly, I didn’t want to lose her again.
“Ach, pet, you’ll be the star,” she assured me.
My chest puffed out but then I shook my head, feeling bad for her even as I confessed, “I don’t ever want to have a broken heart.”
Slowly spinning around on her little stool, she looked into my eyes and sighed. “Sure, that’s love, Shae darlin.’ Every love story ends with a broken heart.”
True to her word, she wrote herself into an entirely new book.
I was the star.
It was my heart breaking now.
But it was far from the first time.
Watching her waste away while keeping a smile pinned to my face cost me every ounce of energy. Checking her into hospice care was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do, but it gave me space to weep.
I stayed with her as many hours as I could every day, the thought of her dying alone haunting every waking minute away from her. At night, when I crawled home to bed, memories I thought long buried swam to the surface.
For the longest time, it had been Dad and me. My memories of my mother comprised of a fleeting sense of warmth and safety elicited by the fragrance of her perfume along with a thick mantle of sadness when winter gave birth to spring, where everything was new at the time when everything was lost.
Family photographs filled in the gaps.
Dad showed them to me so often I couldn’t tell where my real memories of my mother ended, and the photographs began. They told the story of a sweet love that changed a woman and a man into a bride and a groom then bestowed upon them a round, smiling baby that bore little resemblance to my current manifestation as an introverted ball of angst.
How different might I have been if my heart had not been so mercilessly bruised as a child?