Song Selection: Show Me Love (feat. Chance the Rapper) Skrillex Remix ~ Hundred Waters

After one long year, we are finally having the memorial service for my maternal grandparents.  My grandfather passed just before the pandemic hit the US, which is really for the best.  He would have hated being cooped up in his room, and, having survived polio, one epidemic was probably enough.

My grandmother was moved to hospice care shortly before the pandemic began.  I had the chance to see her one last time before lockdown.  She passed away from old-age, also spared by the pandemic despite cases in her nursing home.

I finally began writing a eulogy for my grandmother, or whatever it’s called if it’s not the official eulogy.  When I was in college I had the great fortune of doing an oral history with her.  I loved all the pictures she shared, and my grandfather carefully scanned and emailed them all to me (back when both were still fairly unique things).  My professor was worried using my laptop would be a distraction for the recording; I explained that my grandpa had owned a computer since the time I was born.  He was like that with his gadgets.  Always the newest thing.  He would have loved a smartwatch, but by the time they started becoming a big deal he was beginning to age out of technology, having a flip phone at the end.  Although a few days before he passed, while we sat around watching the Super Bowl for his birthday, he said he was thinking of getting a smartphone.  We talked him out of it - given the cost.  I don’t know if that’s one less contract my aunt had to cancel, of if it was one more thing that made him decide it was time to go.  Maybe both.

My grandfather loved me; he loved all his grandchildren.  But that love didn’t come easy for him.  Being the first black grandchild, he didn’t hold me until I was two years old.  The way the story goes, I kept pounding on his legs until one day he finally reached down and picked me up.  My grandma and aunt told the story with tears in their eyes.  I guess for me it was another explanation as to why I found it hard to get close to him.  Not that I didn’t love him.  I moved back to Michigan partly to be close as they both approached the end of their lives.  But my grandfather was an old school Republican (who did not vote for Trump - the only political thing we ever agreed on).  He frowned upon my Angela Davis t-shirt and laughed heartily when I told him I wanted to go to Yale for undergrad (I went on to be accepted to a different ivy league, and ultimately accepted an academic full ride to one of the top universities in the country).  He told me I’d become a Republican once I started making money.  He was the epitome of an old white man.

But my black baby cousin, my grandfather was over the moon.  He loved being a father figure to him.  Loved sharing his trinkets and his stories.  I’d never really thought about it until now, but I guess I eased him into a mixed race family.  Because after my cousin, my sister-in-law and my nieces came along; I’m sure my grandfather never anticipated being outnumbered at the dinner table.

There are so many social expectations around how we speak of those who have passed.  There is a demanded reverence.  As a black woman with a racist family past, what are my expectations?  What does it mean to be silent simply because my experience might make other (white) people uncomfortable? I suppose I have learned that being silent about my truth ultimately leads to more oppression, more secrets, more “acceptable” bad behavior. 

I loved my grandfather, and he loved me, despite all the ways society socialized us to have an adversarial relationship. That’s also my truth.