Lucille was cremated, and her ashes were sent to somewhere in Orange County. “Why Orange County?” I asked my mom.
“I don’t know why Orange County,” my mom said. She repeated the last three words as I did.
“What does it matter?” I heard my dad say in the background.*
I said it didn’t matter, but it was curious. Why did Lucille stay alone in Hemet those last years? Why did she refuse to come back up to Los Angeles? Was she having an affair with my grandfather back in the 1940s, when she was hired to be my mom’s younger sister’s nurse?
It’s odd that the only photo I have of Lucille is this one. My mom is standing at the right with the cute white overcoat (this may have been around the one time I know of when Los Angeles had bona fide snow). She’s about eight-years-old. My aunt Barbara, a year older, looks like she could be Lucille’s daughter, but Lucille looked like a goy version of my Grandma Birdie — tall, thin, minimal chin. This photo was taken of Birdie at Santa Monica beach sometime in the 1930s.
On Thursday, I’m going with my mom and her younger sister Judy to Hemet to go through Lucille’s things for photos and anything else “that has a memory,” as my mom put it.
* * *
* This comment was unsurprising. Back in 1994, Dad failed to tell me my grandfather (his father) had been in the hospital for two weeks and was dying. If I may quote myself…
I missed Rosh Hashanah and my first week of film school classes to attend the Telluride Film Festival Student Program. The following weekend, distracted by my classes and the relentless heat, I made a U-turn into a mini-van and gashed up my head. I didn’t want to worry my grandmother, so I ignored the Post-It note on my desk written in black sharpie that shouted, “Call Grandma and Papa!” until my mother came over for the duffel she had lent me two weeks earlier.
Mom pointed at the note, which by now had a dozen other things scribbled around it, and said, “I’ve been meaning to call Sue myself.”
I dialed. Speaking with a brightness that goes in tandem with guilt, I said, “Hi, Grandma! How are you? How’s Papa?”
“He’s at Cedars,” Grandma stammered. “Didn’t Walter tell you?”
I looked at my mother as I said, “No, he didn’t.” Stupidly, I handed the phone to her. They spoke briefly, a conversation that had no relation whatsoever to the news.
“You didn’t know about Aaron?” Mom said cautiously as she hung up.
“Dad didn’t tell me.”
“He’s been there for almost two weeks,” Mom replied as if the length of Papa’s stay had placed the onus on me to be omniscient. “I’ll make sure that Greg and Jon know, in case they don’t.”
Two days later, my younger brother Jon called, voice cracking, asking if I knew Papa was dying. “No one told me he was even sick. How long have you known?”
I phoned my parents. “What were you guys thinking?” I yelled at Mom, who was unlucky enough to have answered. “After what happened with me?”
“I’m not going to call every goddamn person just because my dad’s dying!” Dad raged in the background, as if three phone calls to his three children would lead down a slippery slope to everybody.
Technorati Tags:
Lucille, memory token, Robyn Weisman, memory, death, conundrum
Leave a Reply