My parents have been in our quarantine “bubble” since Day 1, with the blessing and approval of our friendly local health experts. I’m so grateful they’ve been part of our world, as much so that I can keep an eye on them as they can help out with their grandchildren whom I’m failing to homeschool adequately. One night this week, my mom dragged out a shoebox full of treasures, her version of Homeschooling History. The shoebox contained beautiful old photos of family members, some of which I had never seen before, including a photograph of my grandmother at four months old. The box also contained my grandmother’s high school diploma, the guest register from my grandfather’s funeral, and best of all, some notebooks with entries in my grandmother’s handwriting.
My grandmother’s writing mostly consisted of bridge scores on the backs of envelopes, tucked inside her Bible or her other sacred text, the crossword puzzle dictionary. She did keep a notebook, though, of notable facts and dates, and we found one in the photo box that my mom has kept. She almost always wrote down what the weather had been that day. She wrote down when certain seeds were planted in her garden. She recorded when family members came to visit, and when she visited other family members. My grandmother would have loved food blogs and foodstagramming — she almost always wrote down what food was served at special holiday meals.
As one does, I looked for my own name, naturally. “Carrie is eight today! She and [her brother] Paul came out to help in the garden for a while. Carrie was very helpful with picking beans. Paul mostly picked beans out of the pail and ate them.” These are the kinds of things you can’t find on Snapchat.
The journal we found this week, though, was as notable for the things it did not say. Knowing what I know, even though I was a child at the time it was written, there were a lot of words that my grandmother did not write down. My grandfather’s tricky knee spanned several entries, but his (eventually fatal) cancer diagnosis was reduced to a single line. Maybe that was kept in a separate journal, protected from the eyes of a curious granddaughter thirty years later. Or maybe it was held in her heart, because it was too much to write down in words. It’s possible she was mad at him for the bottle of brandy he kept in the garage, and so she didn’t know what to feel when faced with an uncertain diagnosis.
My sister and her new husband took off after their wedding but before the post-ceremony family photos were taken. This was her jackwagon version of elopement: rather than running off and doing the whole thing on their own, they still had everybody get dressed up and pay for everything, including the photographer’s time, and then left after the ceremony. Those photos are the last family photos where my grandfather was appearing mostly well, and my sister (the bride) was not in them. In my grandmother’s journal, she described the wedding ceremony, how we all traveled there, what we ate afterward, and even the hotel swimming pool. She did not say one word about the disappearing bride and groom and all of the angst they caused that day. It’s impossible that she would have missed it — there were fewer than twenty people there, including the bride and groom. There was no mistaking the tension in the air that I still remember, even though I was only ten years old at the time. It didn’t make the journal, though. Just a line at the end about “God bless them in their life together.”
People were woven into and out of the pages of that journal. There was one fraught time when one family member was trying to bring another family member into the fold, back onto the wagon and into family life. None of this detail was recorded when she mentioned that there would be a visit happening, but there was a hint that my grandmother knew exactly what was happening: a line at the end of that entry saying “God help them.” In her three-word prayer, she prayed for the helpers, the one they were trying to help, and probably herself, too.
I don’t know what my grandmother would have recorded about this time. Would she talk about the fear and uncertainty that everyone seems to be feeling? Or would she record the weather and the dinner menu? She’d undoubtedly write down the types of seeds we planted this week and whose birthday we celebrated, but she might not have mentioned how the birthday party was conducted on Zoom and the seeds were purchased during a frantic week when fresh lettuce from the supermarket felt like a death threat.
One word of comfort, though, she almost certainly would have included at the end: “God help us.”
This invocation covered our family for all of the years before, after, and since those words were written in my grandmother’s loopy handwriting. They covered us even when the prodigal daughter took off and didn’t come back to be photographed in her bridal gown. They covered us in sickness and death, through trick knees and cancer. They covered us through unspoken struggles with addiction and loss. Those words haven’t warded off any bad things from happening, but they have made us feel less alone. The details — the living that we are doing right now — may or may not be recorded or remembered. But my grandmother’s prayer — “God help us” — remains.
Featured image: Infrogmation of New Orleans.
COMMENTS
2 responses to “God Help Them: Details Written (and Unwritten) in a Grandmother’s Diary”
Leave a Reply
So awesome, Carrie! You certainly have a gift for seeing what is written and what is not written—and then putting those things in your gifted writing. Thanks for sharing your gifts with the rest of us.
I would definitely include this in THE book!
Happy Birthday, David!
Brought tear to my eye and resolve to share these generation stories more with my kids. Thanks for recording this.