Scotch Guard

This year, on a whim, I included my email address on the holiday card I sent to my stepmother.  Why, you might be wondering, had I never done this before?  It's because my relationship with my stepmother is complicated.  She entered my life when I was about twelve years old, and she was pretty much the opposite of Cinderella's.  Mine was kind and quiet and funny, and she clearly made my dad very happy.  This last part pissed off my mother enormously, so blood-covered daggers would fire from my mother's eyes whenever her name was mentioned.  

My parents had a very 1980s divorce: My mom had primary custody of my sister and me and we would see my dad on the weekends for the short time that we continued to live in the same town, and once we moved, we would see him for a couple of week-long visits each year, with a smattering of weekend visits here and there. (We lived in different states.) I never lived with my dad and stepmother, although there were many, many times that I wished I did.

When I was 21 my dad died suddenly and unexpectedly.   Although I hadn't gotten to know my stepmother super well, during our visits I perceived her to be a gentle soul who'd had her share of heartbreaks before meeting my dad.  She was the one who found his lifeless body, and bewildered and devastated as I was that he was gone, it was somehow worse knowing that she'd found him and had to be the front-line supervisor of all things post-death.  I have this weird feeling of guilt about it.  My sister and I visited her a couple of more times after my dad died, but it was inevitable that the relationship would slowly diminish to exchanged birthday and Christmas cards, which it has.  I'd thought about including an email address before, but ... I don't know.  I felt like the only adhesive for our relationship was a shared pain over a loss, and really, what were we going to say to each other?  I just didn't know her very well. There was barely enough to include in twice-yearly greeting cards.

Further complicating matters was my dad's mother and sister.  My sister and I were never particularly close to them, and even less so after my parents divorced.  My grandmother especially seemed to blame my sister and me for this, as though it was our duty as children to wade through the muck of a very ugly divorce and make the lion's share of the effort to maintain a relationship that had never been very strong to begin with.  To her credit, my stepmother did a much better job of keeping up with my dad's family.  Within a few years of my dad's death, the extent of my relationship with my grandmother was her annual drunken phone call on Christmas Eve, where she would slur an indictment of how ungrateful we were for not maintaining more of a relationship with her.

And let's not dance around this: She drank a lot.  And smoked constantly.  In the years before he died, my dad made half-hearted jokes about how he was having to make sure he called her earlier and earlier in the day, because the window where she was sober enough to keep up her end of the conversation was narrowing.  

Before my dad's funeral, the last time I'd seen her for more than a short visit was a week my sister and I spent with her shortly after my parents' divorce.  She was living in a Southern California community that was exclusively for retired persons where the average outdoor temperature seemed to be 110ºF all year.  She would get up early and work in her little garden, but by 10:00 a.m. the heat was intolerable.  She would busy herself inside for an hour or so, then light another cigarette, make lunch, and fix a cocktail.  And so it began, until she stumbled to bed at 8:00 p.m.  One of the things I remember most from that trip was that when she would lean over the counter to make a sandwich, I could see her large mastectomy scar.

In any case, my last Christmas Eve drunken berating from her was about twelve years ago.  Around that time I heard that she and my dad's sister were planning to move to Texas together.  My stepmother stopped mentioning them in holiday and birthday cards, and I assumed that my grandmother had died.  I mean, the fact that a woman with a serious alcohol and tobacco habit, who'd survived breast cancer had made it to her seventies, when her son and dropped dead at 52, was mind-boggling.  And it would have made sense for my stepmother to not want to share the news that she'd died.

But guess what?  I got an email from my stepmother.  My grandmother has pickled herself to the  age of 93 and is still going.  I am absolutely stunned by this news.  Stunned!  I'm angry and bitter that she got to live and my dad didn't, and yet strangely enchanted by the fact that longevity like this exists in my bloodline.  If she's not being studied around the clock, medical science is missing out.