How can you connect with someone you never even knew?
I’m 42, an age that my biological grandmother never saw. From what I’ve been told, she passed away in her mid-30s. She had a terrible headache one afternoon and told my dad, as well as his two siblings, that she needed to take a nap. She never woke up from that nap and died a little while later in the hospital from a brain aneurysm. This was in 1961, so there weren’t any treatments available to save her life.
I’ve always wished that I could’ve met her; I think about her more than ever now that I’ve reached middle age. I had a dream a while back that I was encircled by a group of older women that claimed to be witches (good ones) and psychics. One of them asked me what I wanted to know, or what I wanted, in general. In my dream, my first thoughts of what I wanted to know were of selfish things that only involved my future, but that’s not what came out of my mouth.
What I said was, “I want to meet Rhe.” Rhe was a nickname that everyone called her; it stems from Agnes Marie. The circle of women took one step back except for one of them, a white haired, old woman. She came forward, gave me a big hug, and whispered in my ear, “I’m Rhe.”
The tears that poured out of my eyes in the dream were also pouring out of my eyes in the middle of the night. I remember I woke up, my pillow damp, and realized that I had finally met my biological grandma, which made me cry even harder.
My aunt, Rhe’s only daughter, has been searching for her dead mother her entire life. This past summer, we had a family reunion in Cincinnati, where my dad and his sister still have relatives. We were able to visit a home that my grandpa built in the mid-50s, and the family had briefly lived in before moving to California.
It kind of broke my heart when my aunt pulled me aside and said, “Do you think my mom’s still in there?” I feel like my aint has lived with the grief of not being raised by her biological mother her whole life, the grief of only having nine years with her, the grief of what could’ve been.
I guess I’ve also been looking for Rhe, or wanting to connect with her in more recent years. When I was young, I would think about her from time to time. I wondered if she was watching over her children and her grandkids. I wondered after my grandpa died if they were reunited in the afterlife.
Now that I’m older, and just getting old, I think about her more and more. I have outlived her by six years, which makes me feel sad for her.
I made a decision that I wanted to visit her grave because I never have, and because I wanted some sense of closure to this whole matter. She’s buried in a cemetery that’s not far from where I live. The only information that I knew of the whereabouts of her headstone was that it was “near a gate”, as my aunt explained a while back.
Here’s the thing with this particular cemetery: they don’t give you the exact location of the grave you’re looking for. They can give you the section you’re looking for and the number of the grave, but it’s not very detailed.
As I parked my car, I decided that I needed a strategy since I had never been to her grave before. Unlike other relatives that are buried in this same cemetery, and whose burials I mostly remember, I had no frame of reference. My strategy was that I would start with the graves closest to the gate that my aunt had mentioned and just walk the row back and forth until I found it. I designated two points to walk in between, which were two large trees.
As I started walking up and down the rows, I noticed that many of the headstones had dates of deaths from the 60s; this must’ve been the section they used at that time for burials. I started to wonder if I was in the wrong section because I was getting further and further away from the gate when her grave appeared almost out of nowhere.
When I first saw her grave, I said, “Oh, there you are,” as if I was talking to a person. It felt surreal to be standing there, to know that below me was her, of what might be left of her body. Within seconds I was crying. I had planned all of these things that I wanted to say out loud, but I couldn’t gather those words in those first couple of moments, so I just stood there, wept, and looked at her headstone.
It’s a simple headstone without much on it. My grandpa didn’t have the money to buy her headstone when she first passed away, and when he remarried a couple of years after Rhe’s death, my grandma purchased it for Rhe. I was surprised to see that it’s in good condition considering no one ever really goes to visit her.
After a little while, I was able to say the things that I wanted. Because I was there right when the cemetery opened for the day, the stillness created a sense of serenity and privacy. I cried a little more, and noted that I was happy she has a view of a giant tree, which seems silly to say, but I hope she likes it. I took one last look at her headstone, said goodbye, and headed back to my car.
It’s been about a week since I went to visit Rhe, and looking back, it still feels strange. I was hoping to get a sense of closure, to feel like I had found some kind of peace in visiting her grave, but that’s not the case. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel at ease with the fact that I never had a chance to know my biological grandmother. Like my aunt, I know that I’ll be searching for her until I die. Maybe then, I will finally get a chance to really meet her, hug her, and find that closure.
