My Baga

My grandmother passed away Wednesday morning. It wasn’t unexpected, other than we thought we’d have another day or two, but despite weeks of preparation, knowing this was coming, the news still stole the breath from my lungs.

I stared at my phone, reading those words over and over again, waiting for them to make sense.

How could she be gone?

I didn’t know what to do. I had started getting ready for work when the news came in, and the only thing I could think was that I might as well go to work until something else made sense.

I thought when I found out about this, I would burst into tears. Break into a million pieces. Curl up into a ball.

But I was driving into work and feeling nothing.

Intentionally feeling nothing.

If I felt, it would hurt.

It would hurt a lot.

Hours have passed now, though I’d have to think hard to calculate that. It feels like a week, and yet I could have been making that drive this morning.

My life doesn’t feel like my life right now. It feels broken.

Empty.

In order to understand this, you need to know about my family.

I have been going to Chicago at least twice a year for longer than I can remember. Every Christmas and 4th of July, we were headed up to the house to stay for a family get together of some kind. If it was 4th of July, it would be the massive gathering of my dad’s cousins and their kids, high school friends of my aunts and uncles, neighbors that had been there for years, and friends of my own cousins. I come from a very close, very large Irish extended family. It’s honestly huge. Family gatherings with this crowd are loud and need their own zip code. Everyone was welcome. Always.

We love it. Chaos that it is, we love it.

Christmas was a more intimate group. Just my dad’s siblings and their families. Just 27 or so people. Unless boyfriends were brought over. And spouses, when they came. And kids, when they came. And usually a dog or two.

Absolute chaos. We love it.

My grandparents were always at the heart of these things, not just the hosts.

I have treasured memories of waking up early in the morning and coming up the stairs of their house (the grandkids sleep on beds and air mattresses in the basement) and smelling coffee that Papa had made. I’d walk around the corner of the kitchen to peer into the living room, and there Papa sat, in his oversized chair, glasses on crossword in hand. He would smile at me and sing a silly little morning song to me. I’d smile and go sit on the couch, embarrassed but happy, and just sit there. Maybe we would talk, maybe he would just do his puzzle.

But we were together. I was at the most magical house in the world. Nothing was better.

Papa died when I was a freshman in college. My entire adulthood has happened without him in it and that sounds so wrong.

Baga was there, though. She was always there.

Baga is the name for our grandma. My brother couldn’t say ‘grandma’ when he was little, so he called her Baga, and it stuck. We’re the only family in the world with a Baga. We love that.

Growing up, Baga was a magical person. She had all of these stuffed animals on shelves in her bedrooms, and sometimes we could pick out an animal to take home with us. She started us on our beanie baby kicks back in the day. She used to send us photo boxes FILLED with presents wrapped in tissue paper. Those boxes took FOREVER on Christmas morning. For a few years, we got a box every couple of months that was filled with presents for each kid in the house. The gifts were always perfectly apt for each of us.

When we were little, the Christmas presents were from someone else. Rudolph or Popeye or Rapunzel or Oprah, whatever struck her fancy. It was a cute, creative quirk that made Christmas so fun. Baga was full of quirks like that, and we embraced them all. She used to put our names on the bottom of trinkets we’d given her or that we liked in her house, so that when she passed, we would have claim on the items. It became a running joke, putting our name on things. “My name is going on this chair.” “I put my name on that mug.” “Can I put my name on Papa’s car?”

We didn’t actually want to follow through on any of that, but now…

Now we really will be looking at names on the bottom of things and see if we want what we had once claimed.

Baga was the sort of grandma who never thought we were pestering her. She played board games with us for ages, and with more patience than any human has a right to possess. She let us wear her glasses and stood in pictures with us while we all looked silly in them. She would indulge in our imagination games, and give us butter cookies when we pretended to be dogs. She made sure there was always food we would like at her house when we came to visit, and food we never got to have at home. She had a fridge in the basement that was always filled to the brim with various cans of pop and bottled juice and water, just so that everyone would have something they wanted to drink there.

Imagination was important to Baga, as was fostering our creativity. She knew I liked writing little stories, so I got sent writing journals, create-a-puppet-show kits, books upon books to read, and she asked me about them. She got a little mailbox for her house so we could “write letters” and deliver them while we were there. We wrote plays and acted them out. We watched instructional dance videos. We had New Year’s Eve parties. We had birthday parties.

We had everything.

She fully embraced my bookworm personality, being a reader herself. Books were a constant present for me, and I loved it. We talked about our favorite books, books we recently read, books we were interested in. She gave me a full set of Jane Austen books when I graduated from 6th grade. It was treasured then, and it is treasured now. She got me hooked on the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth, which is still my favorite mini-series and a staple in my life and career. I can directly trace my career in writing to Baga and her place in my life. I would not be doing this if she had not encouraged my love of books, of writing, and of all things creative. If I owed her nothing else in life, I would still be in her debt.

Baga loved food, and that is a family trait we can all claim. There was always food at the house, either that had been purchased for our stay or that had been made and brought over. We ate constantly whenever we were there, and she always snuck food she wasn’t supposed to have with her health issues. She had ice cream in the freezer all the time, and we would check the moment we got to her house to see which flavors she had that time.

Somehow, there was always Moose Tracks in the freezer.

There were no secrets in our family. Not really. We’re pretty open with each other, but also… Baga was terrible at keeping secrets. If you wanted the whole family to know something, you told her. It would get around pretty quickly. One of the most commonly heard phrases in a phone call with Baga was, “Well, I don’t know anything else,” and then she would think of something else about someone in the family and tell us all about it.

She was so proud of everything her grandkids did. She wanted to wear a shirt from the schools and universities we attended, and had a huge collection of them. She wanted to hear about our lives, and usually remembered what we had told her. She sent cards every birthday and Christmas, and some other holidays in between. If she read something in the paper that made her think of us, she’d clip it and mail it our way. Sometimes she included a note for us explaining why, sometimes just the article.

Baga loved animals. Like REALLY loved. She had birdseed for her feeders and breadcrumbs and peanuts for the squirrels, which got tossed out onto her deck. Going to her house was an experience in National Geographic Live. Rabbits, foxes, possums, skunks, birds of all sorts, and really, really plump squirrels. She loved any time we donated money to a cause geared towards saving animals in her honor. She had spent years volunteering at the humane society, and always wanted us to bring our dogs with us when we came to her house.

The idea was that if we didn’t bring our dog, we shouldn’t come at all…

My cousins’ dogs were practically cousins to me, too.

As the years wore on, Baga’s health declined. She never lost her spirit and vibrancy, she just couldn’t move as fast or keep up the pace or hear as well. It became harder to remember details or things she had already said. It took her longer to comprehend what we were saying, or to follow a family game we were playing. She was still sitting in the middle of it all, not wanting to miss a single moment with her family.

Her aging frame frustrated her.

Every phone conversation with her would have her tell me she loved me at least three times. It had more endings than a Lord of the Rings movie. It could go on for ages and ages, no matter how tired she claimed she was. It was like being in her living room chatting in person no matter where I was.

It warmed the heart and filled the soul, each and every time.

Losing Baga feels like losing my own heart, in a way.

And it feels like losing Papa again, too.

At the same time.

Both of them.

The house will soon be emptied of the things I’ve spent years seeing. The furniture will go to whoever wants it, or be donated. The artwork that has covered every wall in the place will come down. The squirrels will not get their treats, and the birdfeeders will come down. The air mattresses will get tossed. Papa’s chair will finally leave its spot. There will be no more creeping up the stairs and trying to avoid the creaky one. There will be no more pop in the fridge, games in the closet, or annual organizing and hanging of the massive amount of stockings at Christmas.

There will be no more memories.

Losing Baga is losing all of that. It’s losing our gathering place, the hub of all bustling and laughter and family gossip. It’s losing our center. Our heart.

The heart of our massive, crazy, chaotic, loud, loving, incredibly close family.

We’ll still gather, of course. Our relationships won’t be severed because she is gone. We’ll still laugh and play games, we’ll still tease each other about significant others and talk about our jobs. I’m not sure who will become the family’s Secret Sharer in her place, but I’m sure someone will step forward.

I’ve been told it’s never easy to lose a grandparent. I know that. I’ve lost grandparents, and it’s awful.

But no one warned me what it would be like to lose Baga.

There were no grandparents like Baga.

Even when we lost Papa, as heartbreaking, life altering, and mind blowing as that was, at least we had Baga, which helped to keep Papa with us.

Now they’re both gone, and I hurt all over.

Not all the time, but enough.

Seeing her empty bedroom makes me cry. Thinking of never going to that house again makes me cry. Knowing I won’t hear her voice again makes me cry.

I’m a crier, but this isn’t just a matter of tears.

This is breaking me in two.

It comes in waves, my sisters and I have said. Sometimes we can laugh, and then we’ll turn to crying. Sometimes we’re crying, and then we’re laughing through our crying.

That’ll go on for a while. It’ll still come in waves, though the time between the waves will eventually get longer and longer. We’ll go on, and we’ll be fine, and we’ll remember her with all the love in the world and only a little pain.

I spoke with Baga less than a week before she passed, and her last words to me were these: “I’ll talk to you again.”

I can’t wait for that next conversation, no matter how it happens.

I bet she’ll still tell me secrets from the family. I bet I’ll still feel like I’m in her living room. I bet she’ll still tell me she loves me at least three times.

And I have no doubt it will still warm my heart and soul.

But I will miss her person and her presence, her hugs and her voice, for the rest of my life.

My Baga