Two Stories About My Grandmother

Anna's gone. My very first chosen family.

She died at 92 surrounded by people bound to her by love alone. Yesterday she ogled a cute phlebotomist's butt. I don't think anyone there would deny that it was time.

Jan, her daughter ("just adopted," she told the funeral home over the phone, as if it meant less that they had chosen each other) told these stories while we watched and listened to the steadiness of her breathing and waited for a change.

1. Anna's Quilt

Anna and her sister Sophie were members of the Polish resistance forces during World War II. They were in Warsaw during the uprising (eventually the resistance would be crushed). Bombs were falling and buildings raining down. They needed to get somewhere else in the city, but they needed protection. In an empty apartment, they found heavy down comforters, which they wrapped around themselves. Then they ran.

They made it out alive. Anna kept the quilt, and slept with it on her bed every winter. It was the last thing we covered her body with tonight. There were stains here and there, but the body of it was sound. She wanted it to be cremated with her, so the ashes are "half feathers, half me."

2. Anna and Hal

Anna was married when she left Poland. When she and her husband came to San Francisco, she bought 25 pairs of stiletto heels. One day she was running after a bus to get to work. Stiletto heels, tight skirt. The bus had passed the closest stop -- but it stopped for her. Later she'd learn that Hal, on the bus, had made the driver stop. Later she'd choose between two lovers -- Hal, and George -- and her husband. Later she'd divorce her husband, and marry Hal the very next day. They traveled all over the world, teachers. (I never remember what subject).

Hal died 20 years later, six weeks after an X-ray found lung cancer. There had been another X-ray months before, but someone had interpreted it wrong, or somehow botched it. Hal said, "My knees hurt." Anna and Hal slept in their VW van outside the Baltimore clinic where he got his radiation therapy every day. He'd come back to the van warm all over. "Scorched," Jan recounts. Anna rubbed petroleum jelly on the burns. He wasted away before her eyes.

When he died, Anna left him lying in his hospital bed, got into the van, and drove toward California. When she couldn't drive anymore she walked. When she couldn't walk anymore she screamed, Jan said. Four years later, she moved to Wisconsin to marry a computer science professor who had loved her from a distance with long, awkward letters, but only told her once with his actual throat. Why Wisconsin, why Bob? "To punish myself," she often said.

But if not Bob, she'd never have met my dad, Bob's student, who lived with them, who she would  add to her chosen family, who would be at her side when she died.

Six weeks ago, Jan said, Anna said her knees hurt. And she knew she must have lung cancer (proven right only yesterday when a CAT scan found a huge tumor) because Hal's knees had hurt.

After Bob died, her last name was still Hal's last name. The wedding ring I took off her finger was Hal's wedding ring. When we filled out the death certificate tonight, when they asked about the name of her deceased husband, we gave Hal's name.