just some memories
On January 31st, 2021, my roommate and I drove to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where we planned to spend the month of February. We were coming from Charleston, South Carolina, where we spent all of January, and then we were going to head further south for New Orleans in March. Our travel plans were complicated by the fact that I contracted Covid a few days before, while my roommate remained unscathed.
As we drove, I sat in the passenger seat, tried not to breathe too aggressively into my mask, and complained about my sense of taste, which slowly evaporated over the seven-hour trip. She drove us through a rainstorm the whole way, patiently listened to my complaints, and managed not to get infected. When we arrived at our apartment, we hauled the entire contents of our car up three flights of stairs in quiet shifts. She passed me, my chest heaving as I took a break. “Are you okay?” she asked, looking worried over her mask.
My slow-paced quarantine walks the week before hadn’t exactly tested my physical limits, so this, plus my still-disappearing taste were the first indicators that my body was succumbing to some attack. I hadn’t ever had any notable illnesses before, had never really felt unduly weak, and had never lost any ability before. Throughout February, even after negative test results, I could listen to my heart thud unnecessarily in my chest while we hiked, while I slowly reintroduced running, while I laid in bed some nights.
I wish I could remember our early conversations about why we chose Chattanooga. It wasn’t exactly on the way from Charleston to New Orleans, two cities that were easy choices for us. We knew that the mountains were close, the aquarium was great, and we got an amazing deal on a gorgeous apartment since no other travelers were outbidding us. We maybe knew a total of four people there collectively. I also vaguely knew that my granddad on my mom’s side was from there.
The transition takes a while to migrate from a kid’s perception of their family to an adult’s perspective when I think about what I knew about my grandfather. To take in their archetypal roles in your childhood, only seeing them as flattened characters in the play of your life. If I were meeting someone new at a party, I’d get a full accounting of their life. With your family, you accrue piecemeal facts over the years: maiden names, alma maters, stories about siblings, jobs, and apartments. I knew my granddad loves horses and animals, carpentry, antiques, and his Jeep Wagoneer. A flattened perception, sure, but I also knew that he was from Chattanooga.
While bundled up on the couch one night, I email him some pictures of the city and tell him where we’re staying.
He wrote me back—full paragraphs, a whole page of an email—and concluded it with: “Just some memories. Send pictures when you can.”
We write back and forth. He tells me about driving on the winding hills of Missionary Road on the back of a motorcycle with his best friend named Killer, the smells and sounds of working on the Chattanooga Choo Choo. He talks about the different jobs he had as a kid and how hard his father worked before he passed away. When I write back, I don’t know what questions to ask to unlock another flood of memories. I don’t know what I don’t know about him. My emails read as disjointed trains of thought. I talk about the weather, the apartment I’m in, the walks I go on, and the view from the bridge over the Tennessee River. My life feels incongruous with the pictures he paints of his life in the “good old days,” as he readily describes them.
I swipe on Tinder and make plans with a guy who lives in a small town outside of the city. I ask my granddad how he met people to date when he was younger, and I make a folder in my email called “Papa.”
I ask him more questions, and he sends me more stories. At this point, I don’t yet know that he has picked up writing as a hobby, or that he’s started to write down his memories in Word documents on his laptop. He sends me some writing he’s done on the farmhouse that he built and that my mom, my grandma, and he lived in for decades. I expect the usual series of detailed paragraphs in an email, but instead, he sends me a twenty-page document detailing the planning, construction, and design process that he himself did to stand the house up. The information we’re interested in excavating doesn’t always align: I try to pry out of him his feelings about living there, about building it, and what he was thinking during that time. He sends me an inventory of where every brick on the property came from and a document with subheaders such as “Tiling” and “Notable Shrubbery.”
It was astounding to learn about the scope of what he did, building the farmhouse and barns that he, his wife, and my mom loved and lived in for decades, that I used to play in as a kid, climbing around in the hayloft or sleeping in my mom's old bedroom. Throughout all of our conversations, my grandfather and I never really got to the “why.” Why start from scratch? Why do all of the design and project supervision himself? Why spend weeks and months salvaging materials from all across the area? Why paint every exterior himself, balanced on a ladder that I’m sure gave my grandmother a heart attack?
There are chasms between what my life looks like and what his life looks like. But he and I, we’re both driven to compulsively document, and we have a sentimental streak a mile wide. We talk past each other sometimes, but we keep talking. When I visit Winston-Salem and go out to lunch, or when I call to say hi on some random Sunday afternoons, the conversation is limited to what my sisters are up to, how the stock market is doing, and how all the various pets in our lives are. But it’s like we have this small secret wormhole of connection that we can tap into sometimes over email.
Of course, like with anything valuable and important in life, I email less often than I should, I write back slower than I ought, and when I reread our messages, there are fewer than I remember.
What am I doing instead? My life churns onward and spins like a huge globe. After Chattanooga, my roommate and I wind our way through the country, working our way down south to New Orleans and then Santa Fe, to the West Coast by way of Utah and New Mexico, eventually meandering back across the States via Montana, South Dakota, and snippets of Nebraska and Tennessee. I spend a short summer break back at home with my parents—Covid restrictions having lifted enough so that we can see my grandma and grandfather in their retirement community. Papa and I embark on a building project to construct a set of matching desks for my new room in my future house. One of the emails from that fall has a goofy photo of me giving the camera a huge thumbs-up while staining the desk legs in my family’s garage. I move back to DC and live in a big, beautiful house and throw dinner parties and buy patio furniture and hang pictures on the walls.
My mom texts my sisters and me at the end of September 2022 that they think he’s had a stroke.
My world keeps churning forward while life back at home changes significantly. I go to a wedding in DC, and an engagement party in Virginia, I travel to Austin and Nicaragua, take Spanish classes, and cook dinners. When I go home for Thanksgiving, it’s the aphasia that feels the most unfair. Combined with his hearing loss, it’s now hard for him to converse. You can tell when he isn’t following a conversation, or when he’s trying to get a question out but the words get scrambled en route. I get too shy to email, anxious that if it’s hard for him to respond, that it could be stressful. I make clumsy attempts to help my mom and my grandma when I’m home, fumbling to help him with his jacket, and speaking too fast about things too far away. I figured in theory, I was at peace with the idea of aging. Unflappable in theory, unfearful of the passage of time, until the indignities of aging stare you in the face and you awkwardly look away.
My grandma talks about how hard it is to get his socks on in the morning. I plan my trips around the world. The chasm between us yawns wider.
Before I left Chattanooga back in 2021, Papa sent me the address of the childhood home that his dad built. It’s in a neighborhood not far from where we were staying. He mailed me some pictures of it—actual, physical mail. I sifted through the photos when they arrived, and read the penciled-in dates on the back. I scanned them into my computer and wrote up a letter to the current resident. The letter introduced me, and I asked if there was any possibility I could come by and take some pictures of the house or see the inside, for sentimentality’s sake. Toward the end of our trip, I drove by the house and left it tucked in the flag of the mailbox. She never responded, so on the way out of town, my roommate and I stopped by the house anyways and quickly snapped a picture of me in the front yard, mirroring the images Papa sent of his mother in the exact location, spaced fifty years apart.
If I had made contact with her, or if I had done more, I could have written back faster, asked more questions, sent more emails; didn’t wait so long to start talking, was home more, was able to help more. Perhaps dwelling on the chasm between what we’ve done and what we wish we had done is a family trait, or more likely it’s universal. In a piece about their family home addressed to my mom, my granddad’s writing concludes with: “I look back and realize I was as they say ‘too busy making a living and not making a life’ missing a lot of the fleeting time while you were here.”
Four months after the stroke, my dad emails to let us know that my grandfather is back in the hospital. I’m in New Zealand, in the passenger seat of my boyfriend’s van, weaving along a mountain road on the South Island. We have plans to go to Argentina next, and Montenegro after that, launching ourselves to and fro across the world with abandon. I text my sister. She has been home with my parents through the first hospitalization, rehab, and recovery. Does she think it would be a good idea if I maybe came home?
The closest I’ve come to describing why my grandfather had the drive that he did, is that he had an intense feeling of obligation. Not only did he build his house, but he also juggled endless side projects, participated on every board and committee he could, as well as volunteering his time to anyone who needed it. There’s a feeling of “I’m able to so I should,” or “I am capable and so I will.”This drive, this impetus to take on ambitious projects, to pour from his own cup, to learn how to do things himself so he could do things for other people…it’s foundational to building a good life. It was the engine that drove him.
It’s February again. I spend half of the month and most of March back in my childhood bedroom. My mom, grandmother, and I got to be there when he passed. I’m not sure there’s much to say about that, except that it was my first exposure to grief, really. There was a certain absurdity in the days that followed, which I wasn’t expecting. I remember inadvertently screen-sharing a document in a work meeting where I was drafting the obituary, and my mom sitting at the kitchen island with her head in her hands in bewilderment because my grandfather put in his funeral wishes a request for a live bagpiper. My mom and I knocked back wine in the kitchen, laughed, and cried because he refused to shed his mortal coil until he had gotten my mom through the 2022 tax season. My dad got home from work to find my mom and me in hysterics on the couch because neither of us can get through half a page of the eulogy without dissolving into a wreck.
And then, we make it out to the other side. I fly out of the country a few days after the service, heading to Mexico City. Like a buoy, I step onto a busy sidewalk, and the flow of traffic picks me up and carries me along. During my time at home, I crafted all these grand aspirations for myself, pictured a version of me where I called my grandmother every other weekend, and texted my mom pictures every time I promised to. But I become myopic again, focusing on my growing relationship, my Spanish lessons, the weekend plans and gym sessions and work calls and newsletter subscriptions that crowd my life. My new life is alluring, and I fall for it like a sucker.
Only weeks after I leave home, my mom calls me to tell me she had to put down our beloved dog after a sudden and random downturn in health. We cry on the phone together while I sit on a hot balcony of a hotel room in Oaxaca, Mexico, feeling like I’m living in an alternate universe or on a different planet. You’d think having been through worse, sharing our grief together, you would think we would learn how to lean on each other. But I find myself turning away, embarrassed by my own sadness. I text “How are you?” instead of calling when I should call, and I ignore my boyfriend when he makes moves to comfort me. Looking my sadness straight in the eye, and sharing it with the people around me, makes me feel like I’m keeping a wound open on purpose, and I wimp out instead of facing it head-on.
When back in Chattanooga, I ventured out into a chilly, sunny day to go on my first run after getting Covid. My lungs burn after half a mile, from atrophied muscles, the icy air, and whatever damage was done to my body during the course of being sick. I wasn’t a good runner—it was a pandemic-era hobby I picked up to escape the house sometimes when gyms were closed. I ran my first-ever mile outdoors a few years ago after having the seemingly-obvious realization that I can go further when I slow down. Running in Chattanooga was a re-learning of that same lesson. I plod down the sidewalk and break for walks regularly, irate at my pace and my heart rate, frustrated at losing the tiny gains I had painfully extracted over the past year.
I pick up running again, barely outpacing my walk but covering ground steadily. My lungs heal, and my muscles grow, and I gain back what I lost, and then I lose it again months later, and I pick it up again a year after that, and I make lurching, stumbling progress toward a version of myself that I want to be.
It’s hard to say what you inherit from your family. I don’t think I got an engineer’s brain, or the diligence and acute attention to detail that my grandfather had. But I look at myself, my mom, and my sisters, and a shared love of animals. A love for learning, a curiosity about the world. An appreciation for well-made things, a bargain at a thrift store. A drive to participate. A commitment to family.
My life looks wildly different from my grandfather’s, but I can see the same tools in our hands. I think we inherited this strong sense of obligation, or capability to construct for ourselves a wonderful life. To put in the work—the labor—to build something good. I’m irked by the distance between the version of myself I want to be and the version that I am, and I don’t think I’m very adept at recognizing the scope of what I’ve already built for myself today compared to yesterday. I think that drive to keep lurching forward, the nagging feeling of something that I could improve, will keep shoving me toward a good life, even if it means I’m hard on myself. Maybe with time and age, I’ll learn how to be gentler, less frustrated by what I can’t fix or solve, and maybe I’ll be at peace with the things I was able to accomplish and set aside the ones I wasn’t. But I’m skeptical. I’m not sure it’s in my DNA.