I started reading my grandmother’s memoirs a few weeks after she died. She spent the last years of her life working on them from her retirement community in Scarborough. And though we wrote often, I was relatively absent from her life during those years. In 2016, the day after my grandfather’s death, I drove across the country to start medical school in California. When I moved back to New England for residency – now with a husband and newborn in tow – COVID descended.
“Since the goal of a memoir is to emerge a rather charming ancestor,” she writes on the first page, “I will bury my more shameful moments and beg your forgiveness …” My husband looked up, curious, from beside me in bed and I suddenly registered that I was laughing. Reading it was like being in the room with her again.
In my earliest memories, Grandmama was urging me to write. In middle school, at her kitchen table, she assigned essays and printed vocab cards. “Cut this!” she commented in the margins of my papers. “Simplify!” Writing would be a lifelong companion, she told me, if only I nurtured it, and kept notes. (With signature competitiveness, she was also determined that I would ace the SSATs.)
She herself was a powerful, sparkling writer – all wit and precision – who self-published travel memoirs, family histories and children’s fiction. “Throughout my life,” she explained in her memoirs, “words have been a compulsion.” Her letters to us were so funny that my sister and I used to read them aloud to each other. “Hello my little lamb chop,” one begins. “Lovissimo with bells and stars,” another signs off.
But this last book – written mostly in COVID-induced isolation – dwelled on the beginning of her life. I picture her typing in her blue recliner that faced out toward the Maine coastline; she often paused to watch boats pass on the horizon. Her first language was Spanish because her father, an Army officer, was stationed in Nicaragua. As a teenager, she was rocketed into the public eye when his work as the head of the Manhattan Project became public. And after college, she defied her parents’ wishes and moved alone to Italy.
The younger self of Grandmama’s memoirs grapples with shyness and self-doubt. She worries about succeeding as a writer and even stops entirely for a while in the chaos of raising three small children. It was my father, then 10, she recounts, who sensed something was wrong. “I think this is what you should be doing,” he told her, handing over a stack of dusty pages she had once written about a ski trip.
When I started medical school, I too fell out of writing – medicine was a new world and I was anxious to find my place within it. But in my first year of residency in 2020, with COVID raging in the hospital and an infant to care for at home, some core part of me was missing. I was lonely, and afraid. And I had stories I needed to tell.
I began scribbling notes at the hospital and late at night. When I published an essay about breastfeeding my daughter as a frontline doctor in the pandemic, Grandmama wrote me, “I imagine her reading (this) one day and thinking, ‘My mom is really something!’ ” She added, “Do keep hammering with your pen for action!”
On the last page of her book, age 26, Grandmama meets my grandfather, a penniless graduate student from Yorkshire, England. The rest of their story is family lore – they would have a whirlwind courtship and share a remarkable life spanning both sides of the Atlantic before settling in Maine in their old age. Somewhere in there, she would become the dignified matriarch who taught me to write at the kitchen table two decades earlier.
I saw myself then, emerging after these long and difficult years of medical training. I already have my great love story, and now two beautiful children, but life still holds great uncertainty. And without Grandmama here, her memoirs are a breadcrumb of sorts. “Keep writing,” she tells me. “It will be a companion forever.”
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