My younger sister’s birthday was several days ago (same day I got stitches). She and I are okay, we don’t fight, but we also don’t communicate much. (I went to her wedding, in Walt Disney World, she didn’t come to mine, in Bali.) I usually send a note for birthdays and holidays but I had sort of… let this one go by. I admitted that to E.
He asked when is my sister’s husband’s birthday, a random question, I said I have no clue, it was only Greta, (my grandmother), who kept track of those things. I could go search emails from Greta, and probably find one she had sent to the family list, for my sister’s husband’s birthday. She always included our significant others in her correspondence.
I opened my phone to find that my mom had sent a bunch of old photographs of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, Greta’s mother and father. Beautiful old photographs. I showed them to E. We peered into those for a while, trying to see me in their faces, seeing Greta there, or my mom. They look handsome and serene in sepia tone. She has penetrating eyes and a subtly sculpted brow, square jawbone, soft and solid expression, with sloping shoulders and precise (pianist) hands. She wears an offwhite blouse with extra bibs of fabric down the front, (not fluffy, just draped), pinned with a brooch at the v-neck, under a boxy cardigan with matching skirt, a pearl necklace and an elegant, plain bonnet. He has blonde hair, blonde brows, and deepset, translucent eyes, a seafarer’s gaze, clean expression. He wears his uniform, undecorated. He sailed on a sloop in the navy, patrolling for underwater mines during World War I.
It’s disarmingly easy to see myself in my great-grandfather’s face. That’s me, as a brave young man, in the year 1930. E. goes silent when he sees it. Greta had those eyes too, although her hair was tawny brown, her face more square. She had her mother’s mouth and chin.
My grandmother was a prolific in-writing communicator. She sent emails often to the family list, (she practically was the family list), about backyard (or frontyard) animal sightings, health-related events, astronomical occasions, and light neighborhood gossip. In addition to emails, she sent paper greeting cards for every birthday and major holiday. (She also left voicemail messages long after everyone else stopped doing that. We all have archives of these, brief documentaries of her Durham, North Carolina life.)
I am different from my grandmother in this respect, I am terrible at keeping in touch. In my American family, (what’s left of it), holiday greetings feel artificial and pointless. A few words exchanged a few times a year. There’s not enough shared experience to give them life. Then I procrastinate writing replies, which makes me feel self-conscious, so I harbor secret resentments. (Ultimately, bad feelings toward my own self.)
I admire my grandmother for her ethic of communication. It took stubbornness, an iron will sometimes, to maintain family connections. She did it even through awkwardness, divorces, other circumstances of alienation. She crossed lines, crossed church aisles, defeated angry silences with routine but nonetheless heartfelt greetings. (This seems impossible?) I don’t know if she used etiquette as a weapon (good manners are a martial art in the American South), but she did use it as armor. In this respect, she was unimpeachable.
I felt sad for a minute that I would never be like Greta in this way. I am not a connector of people. I didn’t have the heart to send my sister a message for her birthday. Why not? I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in my character. (She never sends me messages…) Then I asked myself why I couldn’t just do it. Then I decided to send my sister a birthday message, and then I just did. Like swallowing medicine. Really not that bad. Fine!
Then I sent a message to brag to my mom that I did it. (And I wrote this…) It made my mom happy, for a minute.
I have a small amount of ashes from Greta’s cremation. My mom brought them when she visited Bali last year, whispering, “I have her.” Me, mystefied. Who? “Greta.” I told her, “That’s not Greta, Mom. That’s just ashes.” They made it all the way to Indonesia, from a woman who never left the east coast of the United States. We still don’t know where we’ll put them. We’ve considered a few places, scattering them at Bedugul, or in the garden at our house that we’re building, or in Tengger caldera. “If it’s Greta’s destiny,” said E. Still watching and waiting for that decision to come down, from the sky plan. (Greta herself had called them, her future ashes, “my leftovers.” Impishly, defiantly morbid. Her favorite section of the newspaper to read was obituaries. Then, the sports pages.)
After we got married, E. gave Greta’s name and birthplace to the little mosque in his neighborhood. Every year now, her name is called out for community prayers in Galgahdowo, in East Java, with the rest of his family ancestors.
I visited her before I left for Indonesia, in 2019, when it was probably the last time. I helped her clean out a few kitchen cabinets, old boxes. She didn’t like to let go of things, we bickered, she was mischievous. She gave me a silver spoon with her mother’s first name etched in it, (the lady from the photo, in delicate cursive). Which was also her first name, and my mom’s first name, and my first name. Later, after she gave me the spoon, she tried to take it back. She didn’t like the idea of it “lost at some cafe.” (You know, because I’m flaneur-esque.) I scolded her, told her she can’t do that, give something and then take it back. It’s rude. Besides, I had already packed it. (E. overheard the conversation, from the phone in my pocket. He reminds me how I made her laugh.) She said, I suppose you’re right, let it go.
I still have the spoon, of course. I call it the Margaret spoon.