Symbiosis

After all the drama building up to the big event, you’d think that I’d be prepared for the big day: a funeral for my grandmother. But how can you really prepare yourself for a funeral? You know the normal course of things, the chapel, the sacraments. You know the right flowers to send, the clothes to wear, and what to say to the grieving. However, in all that perfunctory preparation, you can never rehearse your own emotions. Sure, I miss her. When I think that I won’t see her anymore I get sad. When I remember that she’s the last truly sincere and unconditionally loving person in my family, I become distraught.

I’ll never forget how she was just a little disappointed when I came out to her. I had already dealt with the rest of the family, had their reactions, and had endured more variations of dramatic emotions than witnessed in a Molière play. By the time I got to grandma, I’d figured that some one must have tipped her off. I guess I should have known better. No one in this family has the balls for it. It’s the classic wasp routine all over again: ignore the uncomfortable situation and maybe it will go away; hopefully no one will mention it again.

I remember it was a summer afternoon and I’d recently finished my undergrad work. I was making my rounds to thank everyone that was a relative or a friend of my parents that had sent some kind of acknowledgement of the graduation. For my grandmother I had taken her out for a lunch at her old club and driven her home. It was something a family member would do once a week since my grandfather had passed on three years earlier. Not that it was a labor to be with her, it was just a labor to get to her. The drive took two hours and four freeway connections to get south past Los Angeles International Airport, two state universities, and Disneyland. After the long, hot drive I was in no mood for “the happiest place on earth”, but I was more than ready to surrender myself to a visit with my comfortable, genteel old grandmother. While most of my family did see and speak to her as if she were a lost glove, or a lonely survivor of lost love, I couldn’t imagine her that way. She may have loved grandpa and missed him very much, but she was still an individual person with her own identity. Treating her as if she were in a perpetual state of mourning would have been disrespectful to that personality I knew as her own person.

To describe her one would have to imagine what it would be like if Jane Curtain or Angelica Houston played a nonagenarian. She was lady-like, and feminine, but there was just something about her that seemed a little stronger than most people would assume. Dealing with the personalities that were living and breathing in my family when she married into it, she must have been very strong. How they never came to realize that boggles the mind; but many of them do suffer the diva complex (and may I remind any of my friends reading this right here and now just to shut up?) Her patience when dealing with any of them could be observed in the way she could converse in a soft tone while still knitting, or crocheting, or cross-stitching. It was such a calm contrast to my otherwise crazy family. A few hours in her presence and I could really feel relaxed. Sometimes I’d find myself nodding off while listening to her monologue story of a recent game of bridge, or was it mah-jongg?

“Am I boring you?” she’d ask while winding a skein of yarn into more manageable ball.

“Oh, probably.” I’d tease and then try to shake myself awake, slowly shuffle a deck of cards on the coffee table and attempt a game of solitaire. I could just make out the slightest glimpse of a smirk on her face never faltering in its gaze to her work.

“Now you’re being a smarty, just like your grandfather.”

“What would he have said?”

“It’s not so much that he’d say anything. He wasn’t as clever as you. He’d just cough, or pretend to fall asleep and snore, or “accidentally” let his cigarette burn holes into the antimacassars.”

“Heh! What would you do?”

“Empty the ashtray into his coffee.” Then she looked up from the yarn and said with the voice of a sincerely concerned hostess, “Oh, did you want me to get you something to drink?” She rose and moved to her kitchen already anticipating an answer.

“Uhm...maybe just some water –or anything I can see through.”

“Suit yourself. Water it is” she’d answer from the kitchen, and returning into the room with a teak tray, an ice cold refrigerated glass pitcher of water and two glasses, “Hmm. As if I couldn’t put anything in that.”

“Dead or alive, eventually I think you’ll want me to leave.” No response. She’d just have one of those very old broad smiles with her eyes twinkling in the wrinkles of that innocent face as she resumed her winding. I decided to ask her about grandpa and some of his smart remarks. “Now that he’s not around, do you miss doing things like that very much?”

“Oh, a little.” She heaved a little sigh. “I miss him every day, but in some ways he’s still here” she smiled as she gave me knowing look, and then continued “It’s not that it’s lonely, it’s just that we enjoyed just being in each other’s presence. He complemented me so well.”

“Other people have paid compliment to you.”

She looked up to clarify her point, “No, no, I mean in the other sense: we worked together so symbiotically, so semi-symmetrically.”

“Ooooooh,” I responded, nodding with understanding. “Semi, sem-o, sem-u, sem-um; I smell the blood of...”

She rolled her eyes in exasperation of my weak joke “Oh, you’ll know what I mean when you marry.” and continued the yarn hand over hand.

“Oh, I don’t think that will ever really happen.”

“You never know.”

“No, I mean that in the sense ‘I’m not the marrying kind’.” There was a pause as I looked over from the bookcase where I was returning the playing deck. She’d stopped and her brows were furrowed just a little. “I mean that I’m gay. I really mean it.” I explained with deep confirming nodding.

“Oh!” she whispered so softly I wasn’t sure if she had heard me or if she’d accidentally knotted her thread. “Well, that’s too bad.” she sympathized returning to her yarn.

Then it was my turn to furrow brows as I said matter-of-factly, “Actually, grandma, it hasn’t been too bad at all. In fact I’m quite good at it.”

“No, I mean that’s too bad because I was hoping I’d have another great-grandson or granddaughter just like you, but now I know you’re going to be the last character of our kind.” She continued winding her yarn slowly around and around with a resigned but distracted interest in it before she concluded, “However, there’s still a chance you’ll meet some man like I did and learn all about symbiosis.”

I leaned in from the back of the sofa gave her a peck on the cheek. “Now, where’s that water? I feel wet.”