You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, they say. You might upset the spirits in question, and then who knows what could happen? But even if the spirit isn’t bothered, the living might still come for you. I wasn’t prepared for that.
In his latter years, my grandfather James took to describing his relationship with my grandmother Elizabeth this way: I have loved Elizabeth my whole life...but she never loved me. To us kids, watching my grandparents together, this seemed plausible. Grandma was intelligent and vital - she was an incredible creative from a young age, and could conquer any medium she turned her hand to.
But Elizabeth was fierce in both the modern and traditional senses of the word. She seemed to be rendered of steel. Her hugs hurt. She could be mean to my grandpa, casually cruel even. So the idea that she’d never loved him back...we could buy that. Such was the strength of her personality that it was easy to believe that, just as Grandpa said, she had always been that way.
After both my grandparents died, my mother found a plain cardboard box in a bedroom closet. She’d seen it before, when helping my grandfather organise things in the days after his wife’s death, and she’d asked him what it was in it. Love letters, said Grandpa offhandedly, so they left the box where it lay.
But in her seventh decade and newly orphaned, my mother took the box home and lifted the lid on her parents’ relationship.
In 1945, my grandfather was dispatched to a training camp in preparation for a faraway war that would end before he was able to board a ship. My grandparents had been married for ten years and had three young children. When James was called up, it would be the couple’s only extended separation since the first flush of their teenage romance. While he was away, it was not unusual for them to write to one another three times a day.
My mother organised the letters into five fat ring binders, slipping them carefully into transparent plastic sleeves. The archive was a vivid portrayal of the domestic life of a working-class family at a critical juncture in American history. My grandparents wrote with remarkable skill and exhaustive detail, sharing a gift for observation and description.
For my mother, however, it was much more than this. It wasn’t the insights into mid-century wartime America that kept her transfixed in her chair for two weeks, reading those letters.
Some of the passages do seem to show the demanding, critical Elizabeth. I would give most anything in the world to see you and the kids again, even for 10 minutes, James wrote plaintively. But then: When you write, tell me what’s wrong with my letters and what you want me to tell you.
It’s all over the archive: Grandpa’s lovesick puppy vibe interwoven with hangdog apologies, and Grandma’s impatient mistress routine, discernible even when it’s subtle. I suppose my vocabulary isn’t large enough, James says, either shamefaced at some criticism or just frustrated at their lot, at the inevitable insufficiency of words in such a situation of separation. It was really good to finally get a letter from you after you had gotten mine, Elizabeth says, her sweetness tempered with with a tang of aggression.
Even if she got shirty with him, though, he wasn’t deterred. When the Captain left he told [the drill instructors] not to let us write letters or anything else but study of an evening, he wrote his wife. They will need a guard for every man to keep me from writing to you if I have half a chance. Maybe he liked it, her high-handedness. He was such a warm person, but maybe the ice-queen thing did it for him.
She knew the power she had over him, and that some of that power stemmed from her beauty. The pictures came and I wanted to send them so you’d get them by Sunday, she writes. Of course, a picture never shows up a woman as beautiful as she really is! I am kinda languid looking…but you really look swell.
It’s strange to think about these things, to speculate on the animal charge of attraction between one’s grandparents, to see it there in black and white, but they were people, after all, alive and young once.
The passages that hit me the most of all the letters are the ones where Elizabeth drops her imperiousness, shows her softness. The longer you are away, the harder it is to take it, and the more lonesome I get…I’ve been awful lonesome for you today. It was quiet here and my tummy kind of hurt. I wish I could go to sleep and not wake up until you are back.
This letter means so much to him. He writes her back straightaway. The guard woke me at 11:15 pm and I got back to bed about 2:15 am. The moon was very beautiful and I didn’t have anything to do for two hours but walk slowly and think of you and what a wonderful person you are. That two hours in the middle of the night broke my sleep, but I sure did enjoy the solitude and thoughts of you.
She knows it, knows how she can be. I imagine her slipping into it, sticking in the knife even though she doesn’t really mean to, she can’t help it, it’s the way she is, the way she comes off sometimes. She realises, she is sorry.
You surely must have not gotten the tone right of what I said about spending so much time writing to you, she says. Don’t ever think that you are not worth many times more than the two hours I spend writing you a letter. That was kidding, but the way I said it you must not have thought so. It’s hard to get the right tone of voice in a letter. I really enjoy writing to you because I just feel like I’m talking to you when I write and you know in our whole history I never get tired of talking to you.
The letters hit my mother, and me, because it showed the extent to which Grandpa, in his twilight years, had been dead wrong about Elizabeth. In 1945 and probably well beyond, Grandma was truly, madly, deeply in love with him.
Seeing the reality of her parents’ mutual love, my mother felt healed. She wanted everyone in my family to read these letters and understand my grandmother better. A lot of folks refused, thinking they were too private, that those words weren’t for our eyes. But I’m nosy, so I devoured them and was amazed.
I transcribed into my phone some passages that my supposedly hard-hearted grandmother had written. I was going out to dinner with some of my family members. Even now, for reasons that will become clear, I won’t say who they were or how they are related to me. In any case, I read out a passage from Elizabeth to James.
If you were here, I’d love you and hug and kiss you enough for the next 20 years. You are always in my thoughts.
The people at the table were gobsmacked. ‘Wow,’ said someone. ‘That doesn’t sound like her at all. She was – well, frankly, she was kind of a bitch.’
Sometime later, I was looking for a way into a book that I was writing, a book about what we leave behind and what people remember about us. I thought, this is perfect! A personal story! So I talked about the letters and how each person in our family remembers my grandma a bit differently, has a different narrative of who and how she was, according to the pieces of her they’d seen. It’s like the old fable about the blind men trying to identify an elephant based on only that bit they can feel - the ear, the tail, the tusk, the hide - and, believing utterly in their particular subjective experience, they come to blows over what they believe to be the truth.
My whole family was excited when this book came out. My relative sent me a text with a photograph of the book cover. Look what came in the mail today, they said. It was lovely and exciting, and I texted back and said, that’s great, I can’t wait to hear what you think! And then they messaged the next day, and the message started with Wow, and I thought that was good, but it turned out to be bad.
Wow they said. I can’t believe that you said, in a published book, that I called Elizabeth the B-word. They actually said ‘B-word.’ This relative couldn’t even remember if they were the one who had said it, but they suspected so. That was a private conversation, they said to me. Couldn’t you keep that quiet?
The deed was done. I couldn’t take it back, I couldn’t unsay it. It was a sunny day, and I was a newly published author, and everything had been great one minute before. Now I was thinking, because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, my entire family might never speak to me again.
It hadn’t seemed controversial at all. Any one of us at that table could have called my grandmother the B-word. But now I was second guessing myself, and I was ashamed. How could I have been so stupid and blind and callous?
I called my mother. I wanted to change the passage for the next edition of the book, if ever there were one.
She said, Believe me, I’ve called her worse. Don’t change a thing. It is real, and it is true, and it will mean something to people.
In so many words, she was saying, go ahead – speak ill of the dead, with my blessing.
B-word or not, I was never really speaking ill of her. It’s not that like that. My grandmother was fierce and strong and hard, and she was soft, and vulnerable, and passionate. She could be warm and wonderful, and she could be a bitch. The same is true for me.
B also stands for ‘beautiful’. She was that as well. She was all of it. And I was, and I remain, proud to scream that from the rooftops.
Some short passages above are taken from All the Ghosts in the Machine. Some were performed for an online version of The Moth in London during Covid-19 lockdowns; the theme that night was ‘Family.’ The subtitle of this post references a song I heard on my last visit to Kentucky on local public radio station WFPK: Paul Thorn’s I Don’t Like Half the Folks I Love.