Dear Isabella,
Here's another one I wrote about Grandpa Hilo. If I'm honest, it's mainly for myself but you'll probably find value in it when you're older.
Love,
Mommy
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If my time with you is a ball of yarn that has fallen out of my lap, the more frantically I try to gather it back up, the faster it unravels and rolls away from me.
I cannot remember the last time we hugged that you were not frail, because it was unremarkable and likely half hearted. It was probably sometime in 1998 or 1999 and it was probably at the end of a trip I made to Hilo and I was probably feeling conflicted. Cayla was a baby, and I bet you promised to move back to Honolulu very soon, and I undoubtedly tried to believe you. Or maybe you had made a quick day trip to Honolulu. One can only guess. You had the stroke very shortly afterwards I'm sure.
Desperate for memories I scour the photos and listen to voicemails. It's interesting what stands out.
In the pictures when I was little you seem so delighted. I feel like I remember being the center of the world. It's weird to realize how long ago this all was.
In so many of the photos I am tiny and white in contrast to you, so much bigger and darker than me, and looking at them makes me feel little and safe. Mom took good pictures. You're looking at me rather than the camera in a lot of them, smiling at something I'm doing, or trying to show me something. She snuck a lot of pictures of us sleeping, and either your hand is on top of me as if to keep me from floating away, or I'm nestled against you like a kitten.
We're often touching in our photos. You were very affectionate. "Hold my toe," you would tell me - meaning your finger. You had the dumbest jokes. One day, dropping me off at summer school, you wouldn't let me out of the car until I kissed you on the cheek goodbye. It was the summer before 7th grade so I was starting to feel uncool about that. But you insisted and then said, "You know why, right?" Exasperated, I sighed, "Why?" Knowing I was annoyed, you grinned, "Because your kiss is on my list." The Hall & Oates song had just played on the radio and you burst out laughing.
You somehow treated me like your princess, and also like a third son. Being the baby of all the kids and the only girl (till Cayla came along 15 years later) by default made me Daddy's Little Girl and all the typical magic that comes with the title. But you also ran down the sidelines at soccer yelling, "You're playing like a girl!" (Twenty-five years later, I have to tell you, "like a girl" is no longer an insult.) You bragged often that I threw a football with a tight spiral. You taught me to fire a rifle with form and precision. You insisted on teaching me the proper way to throw a punch, and congratulated me when I used the skill in real life. This duality has followed me, and I see it now, natural and uncultivated, in my own daughter.
I think that most of our conversations happened on the drive in to school in the mornings. We have Mom to thank for that - it was a careful calculation on her part. I wish I could conjure the details of those moments though. They are there, just barely out of focus. I can feel the chug of the old Pontiac Firebird under me as it sits in traffic on Wilder Avenue right before the Texaco, and the weight of the door as I slam it closed after you dropped me off. I can feel the confusion as you explain to me that you don't quite remember things from your childhood - how could you not remember things that would be so poignant and important? (I get it now.) I can almost hear the way you say "sweetheart" when you talk to me. I don't remember the exact words or the morning but there was once that you said we are very alike and I didn't grasp the significance at the time but I'd like to go back to that day and tell you I agree. I can imagine now the sound of your voice saying, "I know! I smaht das why. S-M-U-T smaht." What stands out is the image of your hand on the gear shift, the feel of your tone in the space of my head.
The gaps stand out too. There were times we went months without each other. There's almost a year of no photos, no memories. This is where the ball of yarn rolls faster and faster away from me. I both know, and don't know, what was happening to cause these deep chasms of time. It has nothing to do with us and everything to do with us.
There were arguments, words thrown that could not be retrieved, wounds inflicted by an adult child who couldn't understand their power until it was too late. How could you have withstood the disrespect and sass flung at you with such fury? The indifference that followed? Now, as a parent, I can only imagine the heartbreak and rage you must have felt. And yet, not even a flicker in your eyes betrayed anything but patience for my impetuousness. You forgave me even before I knew to ask for it.
You weren't perfect, and to pretend you were would steal honor from the good you did have. I think you usually had good intentions but you often failed and you sometimes outright lied. You had terrible financial judgment and you carried enormous debt for most of your life. There was a sliver of time during which you enjoyed great success and I was fortunate to be a child during that time but then it slipped through your fingers. You had a tendency to be unbelievably self absorbed - so much so that it wasn't as if you were choosing your self over someone else. You simply did not see any other person in your field of vision. And usually, you convinced yourself that your choices were somehow in service of those you loved.
Throughout your life, you were unflinchingly yourself, and you demanded that your children carry that same confidence. Your ego was tempered by my mother's humility though, so I landed somewhere closer to the center of the spectrum. But you have passed on to me an inability to be anything other than my entire, genuine self. As I grow older, I realize more and more how alike we are in that way.
We parent more by example than we probably realize so I wonder what I am passing on to my daughter. I hope she will inherit some of our fire - I think it has served me well so far. I don't know if I believe in an afterlife but if there is one, I like to think that if you are watching, you would agree.
