Every now and then I still reach for the phone to call my grandma, and then I remember. It has been years now, and the urge still has not gotten the message.
Grief does not surprise me. What takes me off guard is the questions. All the things I never thought to ask while she was sitting right there at her kitchen table, answering everything I bothered to bring her.
I jotted down all the questions I wanted to ask while she was still around. If your grandma’s still within reaching distance, think of this list like homework and don’t put it off.
What Was Your Mother Like?
I know very little about my great-grandmother beyond one stern picture. Was she funny? Was she strict? Did she sing? My grandma kept all of that person in her memories, and I never asked to meet her once. When she passed, her mother died all the way too, and that thought freezes me.
How Did You and Grandpa Really Meet?
I got the polished two-sentence version at every anniversary, and I took it at face value. But there was a real story in there somewhere, with nerves and close calls and maybe a rival or two. Did she almost say no? Now the polished version is all I have, and I would give anything for the messy one.
What Did Your Childhood Home Look Like?
I want to go through that house room by room like she did. The room where she slept, what the kitchen smelled like, where the winter coats hung. No one alive can show me that map now. A whole house full of her childhood just left the world with her.
What Were You Afraid Of When You Were Young?
Grandmas look like they have everything figured out, as if they have no fears. But there was a time when she was nineteen and there were probably things she was anxious about too. Just knowing that would have taken away some of my shame I felt at nineteen. I never gave her the chance to tell me I was normal.
What Was Your Very First Job?
I know she worked, but I don’t know what, who, or what she did with her first paycheck. I never explored that ‘working girl’ part of her life. Did she enjoy it? Did she have a hate her boss situation? Did she blow it all on something stupid? Those are the tiny details that bring a person to life.
Who Was Your Best Friend, and What Happened to Her?
Somewhere in her old pictures is a girl she’s laughing with, with her arms around her. She had a best friend like I have a best friend with secrets and jokes and a falling out or a drifting apart. I never asked that woman her name. Someone she loved that much, and I could not tell you one thing about her.
What Did You Dream of Becoming?
She seemed content as a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. But before all of that, some teenage version of her wanted something, a job, a city, a stage, maybe an ocean. I never asked whether her life was the plan or the compromise. Either answer would have taught me something I needed.
How Did You Survive Your Hardest Year?
I know the outlines, the year the money went, the year the baby was sick, the year the war took the men. But I never asked how she actually got through, what she told herself at two in the morning. That was the exact survival manual I would need later. She had it memorized, and I never asked her to read it to me.
What Was the Day My Mother Was Born Like?
My mom showed up in whatever weather, after whatever long night, and I don’t know what that day was like. Was Grandma freaking out, was Grandpa walking back and forth, who got the baby first. Mom can’t answer it, she was the baby. Only one person ever had that story, and I never got it written down.
Do You Regret Anything?
It feels like a rude question, which is exactly why I never asked it. But I did not need the confession, I needed the wisdom around it. What she would have done differently is the closest thing to a map for what I should do differently. I asked for her pie crust recipe a dozen times and never once for her recipe for a life.
What Was Your Wedding Day Actually Like?
There is a single shot of the two of them posing soberly next to a car. I never questioned what happened if it was stormy, what they had for supper, who broke down, how the day fell apart. Each wedding has a catastrophe legend and a picture the rest of the world misses. Hers is in a picture without a caption now, and both the people in the frame are gone.
What Songs Did You Dance To?
I never asked her what songs she danced to back then. Whole dance halls lived in her, songs that meant a boy, a summer, a heartbreak. I could have made her a playlist and watched her go someplace I could not reach. Now when the old songs play, I don’t even know which ones were hers.
Where Did the Recipes Actually Come From?
Her recipes are here, but not the stories behind them. Who showed her how to make bread? Whose handwriting is on the earliest note? Which dishes crossed an ocean? Without the story, a recipe is just steps. I keep cooking her food and can’t answer even one question about it.
What Was I Like as a Baby, to You?
My parents told me their version, but grandmas see different things. What did she think the first time she held me, what did she worry about, what did she predict? Somewhere in her head was a version of me nobody else had. I never asked to see myself through the eyes that loved me most easily.
Which of the Family Stories Are Actually True?
Each family has a few legends, like the uncle and the bear, the stolen pie, the almost-made fortune. She was the only one who could tell which parts were real and which ones grew with each telling. I never did get her to put them in order. Now the legends are all we’ve got, and no one can back them up.
Who Is in All Those Old Photographs?
There’s a box of pictures with no names written on the backs. She knew each face, cousins, neighbors, guys in uniform. One rainy day with her and a pen could have saved them all. Now I have a box of strangers with my blood.
What Did You Pray For?
I’ve sat next to her a hundred times in church and never once asked what she said inside. Was it for us, for Grandpa, or for something she never got? Her faith drove her entire life and all I ever saw was the outside of it. I would give quite a lot to know what she prayed for, and if she thought her prayers were ever answered.
What Was the Happiest Day You Can Remember?
I thought I knew, it was a wedding, a baby, some obvious milestone. But the happiest days are sneaky, it could have been a Tuesday at a lake in 1961. Her best day is not in any album because the best ones rarely are. I never asked, so somewhere her happiest day happened and nobody alive knows about it.
What Did You and Your Sisters Fight About?
By the time I knew them they were a united front of old women in cardigans. But sisters fight, and that makes a lot of history. Who borrowed the dress, who told the secret, who did Mother like best. I barely noticed all that texture, the rivalry and the loyalty, and didn’t think to look behind those polite Thanksgiving smiles.
How Did You Keep Loving Grandpa Through the Hard Years?
Every long marriage crosses a desert or two, and theirs must have as well. From the outside it looked easy, which I now know is the finish, not the wood. What did she do when she did not like him much, when money was tight, when grief moved in? I got married knowing none of it, and had to find the answers the slow way.
What Smells Take You Back?
For me it’s her kitchen, coffee, and yeast and dish soap. I never asked what scents would take her to her grandma’s, a hayfield, or a dance. Smell is the fastest route to someone’s past. I knew what she smelled like, and nothing about what she smelled.
What Did You Give Up That Nobody Ever Knew About?
Women of her generation put things down so that nobody heard them land. A talent, a suitor, a scholarship, a part of herself that stayed in a drawer. She never said a word about any of it, which is why I think there were plenty of things she gave up. I never asked, and she never offered, and that silence was probably her last gift and the biggest price she ever paid.
What Advice Would You Give Me at the Age I Am Now?
By the time I was her age, she had endured things I can hardly imagine. I never asked for her advice about being forty or burying friends or raising teenagers. She had firsthand accounts of every decade I was ever going to face. The one person who had walked the entire path ahead of me, and I never asked for directions.
How Do You Want to Be Remembered?
We never let her talk about the end. Do not talk like that, Grandma, we would say, waving it off. I understand now that we were protecting ourselves, not her. She probably had things she wanted said and known and forgiven, and we ran out the clock politely instead. I have wondered ever since what she would have answered.
What Made You Laugh Until You Cried?
I only ever saw her laugh like that a couple of times, drying her eyes with a dish towel. Something in her life had the ability to do that to her on a regular basis, some story, some person, some event that somehow became funny over the years. I never saved those stories, and they were the best. Everyone remembers her as being kind, and I suspect she was probably much more funny than any of us actually knew.
Was There Someone Before Grandpa?
I never thought Grandma had a past. There was a guy who sent letters, a crush at the county fair, someone whose name she never said again. It wouldn’t change anything, but it would have shown her as twenty-two and human to me. I met her at sixty and thought that was the whole story.
What Would You Have Done With More Time?
If your grandmother is still around, this is the one to ask about and even help her with it. Mine had tidbits about trips she sort of told, a garden she kept shrinking, letters she meant to write. I’ve got no clue what was on her list because I never bothered to ask to check it. Ask for the list then be the one who gets two or three things scratched off.
