It was a moderately cool day last Christmas Eve when my mother announced at breakfast that she was going to visit my Grandmother. I had nothing in the works that morning, and, on a whim, I asked if she wanted company. I can claim no clairvoyance of any sort, nor could I have comprehended the fact that I would see her only twice more after this.
It was an amusing visit for myself, at least. While Meme, as we called her, chattered rapidly to my mother in French, I attempted to decipher what little I could while, every now and then adding my contribution when the conversation relapsed into a broken mix of English and French, which I find far easier to understand. I've spent a great portion of my life listening to conversations like this. If there's one foreign language I can recognize right off the bat, it's French. If there's one language I can pronounce relatively smoothly when encountering it in a book, it's French. And if there was one thing I couldn't imagine as a child, it was the thought of having Grandparents without a foreign accent.
If Meme was deficient in certain linguistic capabilities, she yet maintained a razor sharp tongue, and an eccentric ability to create her own catch-phrases which I highly underappreciated as a child.
"Take two, take two!" She exclaimed when offering us cookies, "You can't stand on one leg." Or when apologizing for giving us money for our birthdays: "If I get you green, you say 'Meme, I want yellow,' or if I get yellow, you say, 'Meme, I want purple,' so now you can buy whatever you want in what color you want."
The last time I saw my maternal Grandmother, she was recovering from a hip surgery. This was July 2, 2019 and I had no idea I would never see her again. Of course we took a picture. Gabrielle and I squeezed into a frame with Meme who was as cheerful as was wont, and only dimly aware that she had just undergone surgery. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and I picked up a bit more French than usual, as my mother explained once again, what all of us were doing(she struggled with mild Alzheimers). I received the distinction of being praised for my showy job of teaching the hardest instrument in the world, which always sounds shiny to individuals who don't understand what it entails, and was gratified to hear her recall that I could sing.
We said goodbye, and as my sandaled feet clacked their way back down the hall(I posses unusual sandals) I cannot recall any sense of finality, no impending weight of doom, no voice whispering that in two and a half months, my third grandparent would follow the others out of the shadow lands into the full sunlight of unveiled reality.
I tend to process death rather slowly. Part of me doesn't actually believe it's happened until I attend the memorial service. Even then, it may not hit me until weeks after the fact. I do not know yet when that will come for Meme, but I do know there are already somethings that are beginning to sink in. There are the parts of my life I know she'll never get to see, the people in my future she will never meet, and my opportunity to listen to her hilarious minced-English is over. I still remember with some fondness the way she found it difficult to pronounce the hard c and first sound of a. For her, Cabbage Soup was Garbage Soup, and we really couldn't do anything about it. As Children my sibblings and I found the whole business immensely diverting. My brother Timothy went so far as to split the syllables and help her pronounce the word properly which I heard her do just once before she relapsed to the more comfortable inflections.
There are a lot of wonderful things about my Grandmother that I'm only now reminiscing with the fondness one can have only once one has lost it. However, so as not belabor the subject and bore you interminably, I should like to close with one of my favorite of her sayings. Unfortunately if you don't know how it sounds, you're going to mince this, but I have to put it down in French because that's the way we say it: "Un peu ca va. Beaucoup, c'est trop." Quite literally this means "A little bit, fine. A lot, too much." When you say it in French it flows off the tongue; English, not so much, and I realize one more gift my Grandmother gave me. She helped me realize the importance of language. As well as the understanding that some languages say things better than others.
And now, so as not to commit the crime the proverb warns against, I'll close with the song I remember my Grandmother getting most thrilled over.
Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen while my Grandparents lived next door to us and still had the piano I have now inherited, I would often go over and play for them. While Pepe preferred the minor key yiddish folk songs such as Tumbalalaika, Meme liked the more upbeat French songs she learned in her childhood such as Sur le pont d'Avignon. I played both, but here in honor of Meme, I'll share the latter in a style that probably would have been played during her childhood there. It's in French, and, to summarize, is about people dancing on the famed bridge of Avignon.
And so I leave you, Meme, as I first knew you. Singing in French with a heart overflowing in love for your children and grandchildren. I find the prospect unlikely that we shall meet again, but my life has been made so much richer by yours, and you shall always be remembered and honored so long as I traverse this world.
