Grasp

My grandmother’s funeral was an excuse for me to buy a new dress. I remember it was a long crimson outfit that flew up like a parachute when I ran through the graveyard on a the cold, windy Pittsburgh afternoon. The color and length were chosen so that it could double as a Christmas dress. I was eight years old at the time and I was mad because I didn’t get to sit in the limo. My 13-year old cousin Joey promised me that when he died, I’d get to ride in the black car.

She suffered from emphysema before dying. At the hospital, when I went to visit her with my family for the last time, we all hugged and kissed her. I was this last one to do so, and I was hesitant about going through all the tubes that covered her in order to touch her frail body. She grasped my hand as I hugged her, and when I tried to pull away she held on even tighter. While Dad talked about the morning’s Mass service, I nervously kept my hand still and she stroked my palm with her fingers. When she had a coughing fit, I was relieved when my Dad pulled me away and the doctors came in as the machines beeped crazily.

Before the hospital, she had been at home for several years and was regulated to a wheelchair with an oxygen tube always nearby. She made appearances at first communions and baptisms, holiday parties and her fiftieth wedding anniversary but she was worn down.

What I know about how my grandmother is that her name was either Mary Elizabeth or Elizabeth Mary, and though she was called Betty, she officially went by the Virgin Mother’s name. She had Irish-Catholic parents and came from Philadelphia and thus had a dozen siblings and eight children an named all the girls Mary too. She moved to Philadelphia and went to Duquesne and she walked across the South Side Bridge in order to work at the Heinz ketchup factory. She was so tiny that you could never tell when she was pregnant, so babies just seemed to appear. Yet , she wore a size ten shoe.

She probably never ate because she was always feeding her children. No matter how small the cut of meat she put on the table or how skimpy the loaf of bread, she managed to divide everything into eight equal pieces, so that everybody got a fair share and nobody went hungry. She made plates for her children and warmed them up in the oven when they came home from pool halls and baseball games. She liked to smoke cigarettes and drink beer and she saved the empty bottles to iron clothes with.

During one of her pregnancies, she almost died, and my grandfather promised to attend Mass daily if only she would survive. So while he went Mass in the mornings, she cared for the house and the children and said the rosary in the afternoon.

What I mostly know about my Grandmother is that she was a devoted mother. My own Mom said she was lucky to feel so welcomed by her when so many women don’t get along with their mother-in-laws. My mom loved to play bridge and hearts with my Grandmother and the two drank hot tea together after cleaning up from Sunday upper.

I was sitting at our own dining room table when my mother signed my sister’s seventh grade report, several years after the funeral. She put her signature above my sister’s and then peered at it afterwards.

“This is amazing. Your sister signs her name the same way your Grandmother Polinsky did. The same big loops with the Y and P.” She got a chill from seeing something from someone she loved in her own daughter.

When I was confirmed, I chose Elizabeth as my confirmation name and my father gave me a set of her rosary beads. When times are hard I pray on those beads and ask my Grandmother for help or at least for the wisdom to remember that her favorite saying is true, that “this too shall pass.” Holding the same beads that she used makes me feel as if the link between our hands will never be broken.