My grandmother, Betty Utendahl, passed away in July of 2017 and despite “knowing” her for 25 years, I didn’t know her at all.
No one teaches you how you deal with grief, especially when it is for someone you barely knew. I never really had the opportunity to get to “know” my grandmother, not because she wasn’t around, but due to the circumstances placed in front of us. My grandmother suffered a stroke before I was born, leaving her partially paralyzed and unable to speak. We communicated through expressions, embraces and hand squeezes, leaving us connected through touch, but entirely unaware of each other’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
For years, I struggled with my feelings and connections to my grandmother. I struggled with having so many questions that would forever be left unanswered. My understanding came from the stories told and retold, and from the people who knew her best. For 25 years of my life, she was very much alive, yet very much dead. She existed in a body that was no longer her own, and was a person whose life story was left dependent on the ones her loved ones decided to tell.
According to my family, prior to her stroke, my grandmother was a lifelong victim of heartbreak. Before she could blink twice she became a divorced single mother, and never fully recovered from being left to her own devices by a man she so helplessly, devotedly, tragically adored and loved. Her big jovial smile was a mask for deep pain and sadness. She played Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way” on repeat for decades, with a glass of whiskey in her hand and a sense of hopelessness that she was never able to overcome.
For most of my life, I never understood her heartbreak. I couldn’t grasp how she was never able to surmount the pain of being left by my grandfather. For so long, I naively, stubbornly, selfishly found her 50 plus years sorrow to be slightly pathetic. I resented the stories I heard of her drinking and disposition. At times I’ve blamed her for my addictive personality, as I have had my fair share of leaning into vices, hitting rock bottom, and picking myself up again. For so long, I was desperate to find something to blame for why I needed to spend my early 20s eliminating experiences that most people my age could inconsequentially enjoy.
What I failed to recognize until her final days was that my grandmother was a victim of her circumstances, and that I was horrifically ignorant and inconsiderate to fault her for falling into a trap that was set for her from the moment she was born.
I forgot that she was once a 25-year-old woman like myself, full of dreams and desires that were not afforded to her due to the fact that she was both female and black in 1950s America. I forgot that after the divorce, she had zero opportunities to make a life for herself, as an African American woman, completely uneducated and inexperienced in the workforce. She was a victim of arduous circumstance in a time where both her gender and race were an uphill battle to a degree that my privilege has shielded me against.
It was in her final darkest hours that I was reminded that there was a time before my grandmother became a mother and a grandmother… a time that means more than just a series of photos with stories, told time and time again. There was a time when her dreams and aspirations were as big and robust as mine. There was a moment where her love for her partner and her children was so deep it could move mountains. There was a moment, a moment I experienced many times but overlooked, when she looked into my eyes and without words told me that I could live out her dreams. It is in her passing, that I remember her gaze, the gaze I saw for 25 years, and never understood. It is in her passing that I can feel her grip, her grip holding my hands so tight, assuring me that I inherited her strength. It is in her passing that I can feel her embrace, the embrace that reminds me I am loved and will be loved by her forever and always.
Mourning has a funny way of showing its true colors. It’s been a journey that has taught me more about myself than I could have ever imagined. It’s a foreign feeling to feel closer to an individual posthumously than during their lifetime. It has been six months since my Grandmother Betty passed, and with each day, I am reminded that I have a responsibility in life that is so much greater than I could have ever expected. While I may never know the answers to the thousands of questions I wish I could have asked her, I have her gaze, I have her touch and embrace, reminding me to live out her dreams, my dreams, and all the things left unsaid.