The makings of a life
+ thinking about family, optimization, and grief
Hey everyone!
I hope y’all are doing well. Since the election, I’ve been trying to focus on getting settled in San Antonio… but I got distracted by Brittany + Kevin getting married and a long trip to NYC. I’ve been reading and thinking (strong suits) and attempting to be present (not so much) as the year comes to an end. Some more friends and family will be in San Antonio soon, then I’ll be back in Mississippi after Christmas!
Here’s something I’ve been reflecting on recently. It’s like that Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers lyric. How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? I actually knew everything at 22 and nothing at 26, but you get my point.
Only call after 6PM.
I was working 60, 80 hour weeks in Mississippi, denying any responsibility to my family in the name of responsibility to my work. In my off hours, I cried to a friend about the imagined death of my grandmother. All the while, she was sitting on the same worn, blue leather couch where she probably sits right now. After I brushed off a call one too many times with the shortness I saved only for my family, she decided to add a note into my contact on her phone: only call after 6PM.
My tears must have been prescient. I wasn’t mourning someone’s death; it was shame, masking itself as grief. The image of her aged fingers moving to select, edit, and scroll to the notes with a reminder not to burden a self-important twenty three year old genuinely shakes me to my core.
A few days ago, I went to the post office to buy “three books of beautiful stamps” for my grandmother. She was very particular that the stamps were not to be winter themed in any way, lest she need to reuse them in the spring.
My grandmother, Ida Fae Emmerich Hardy, turned 98 this year. We’re in the process of mailing out her Christmas cards, an annual ritual that, through all these years, has avoided optimization by any of her 16 grandchildren. Tracking down addresses with her is like traveling through time. Leafing through old Christmas cards, deciphering notes in the margins of her 2016 Sunday school roster, running into the street to get the numerical addresses for her neighbors—the way she stores, or doesn’t store, her Christmas card list is so textured, so full of friction, just like the life she lives. It’s beautiful.
At one point, my mom came by and started rifling through the sealed and stamped envelopes. Mrs. Fitch doesn’t live there any more, she said. That’s Thomas’s friend’s grandmother. I’ll have him ask his friend where she lives now. This is a bad system, an inefficient system that is deeply prone to error, but it is a good life, a life with a daughter-in-law who comes over unannounced, bringing with her an encyclopedic knowledge of the people who surround her.
Eventually, we moved into my grandmother’s contacts, jumping out of the phone and back into the envelopes when we came across someone with an address listed. Somewhere along the way, she pulled out a sticky note and wrote a few words on it, slowly, shakily, and deliberately. AC, friends, bridge, church, medical. Categories for us to sort her contacts into. The makings of a life.
Once we made it to the “Cs,” I read aloud a name I recognized but hadn’t seen in almost five years—Ruth Chang, a Millsaps graduate who she was close with in college. During the summer of 2020, the two of us resurrected that friendship from decades in the grave, and they reconnected over the phone. Should I add her to friends? Neither of us had any idea if she was still alive. We revisited the memory together and decided to close the book on it. It’s okay not to know.
Then we got to Laura Fritze. The daughter of a man I dated for a long while. Her father made the same move from McComb, Mississippi to San Antonio, Texas that my grandmother made. She called me a few years ago to tell me he passed away. A bit sheepishly, my grandmother said she didn’t want to put him, or his daughter, in the friends category. But don’t delete them. Don’t you delete them. In that moment, my sharp, bullish grandmother looked to me for guidance. It was disorienting.
I pressed back tears. The presence of my cousin’s baby trying to crawl around the rug in front of us reminded me where and when I was. “I totally get it, Mimi. I have a friend who died, and I haven’t deleted his contact either.” So then, with my grandmother resting on her same leather couch and my friend resting in his grave, we made a sixth category. AC, friends, bridge, church, medical, deceased—the makings of a life.
Thanks for reading this! I’d love to hear what you thought of it, or what it made you think of. That’s always my favorite part.
Happy holidays!
Kendall
beautiful, as always