I want to tell Grandma that I get it. I want to apologize for my discomfort when her face would crumple, her eyes well up, and her voice would break whenever Mom’s name was mentioned.
“My baby! My baby! My baby!” Grandma had wailed when awakened by her younger daughter to the nightmare of her older daughter, Ellen’s violent death.
It was hard to witness the rawness of Grandma’s pain. I ached for Mom also. It was my mother who had been murdered by an intruder in our home. Why wasn’t I crying as well? Of course, I did cry. A lot. But whenever Grandma’s tears flowed, mine evaporated.
Gradually we stopped talking about Mom. Gradually, Grandma hid her anguish. I wish I could tell her I’m sorry I turned away from her pain. She held her sorrow inside and grieved alone. I wish I had understood that no matter how vast mine was, hers was beyond comprehension.
Now I know.
When I was little, Grandma Joyce was my favorite. She was elegant and mysterious. She lived far away in a place called “Guyana,” and stayed summers with us in New York City. I loved her sophisticated way of speaking, how she would say things like, “Maah-velous!” She took me and my younger brother to a Chinese restaurant and let us try the spicy mustard that our parents didn’t allow us to taste. Grandma thought up games like acting out The Cat in the Hat where we got to mess up the house—until my brother worried that the grownups might come home before we cleaned it up.
A few years before I was born, Grandma had divorced Mom’s father, and traveled abroad. She was invited to become a founding member of the University of Guyana. She became a scholar of Caribbean literature and of the works of Herman Melville and Wilson Harris. After six years in Guyana, Grandma remarried and returned permanently to the States. She first published her essays on Melville in literary journals, later shaping those essays into the chapters of a book. It was while she was immersed in this project that Mom’s life was taken. Somehow Grandma carried on despite her overwhelming despair and completed her magnum opus, War in Melville’s Imagination. Her book’s dedication was to her firstborn. She wrote: “To Ellen, who was like a forerunner of what human beings may someday be.”
Despite the enormity of her suffering, Grandma helped me and my brothers through our trauma. Both she and our new grandfather had already raised children of their own. They were at the peak of their careers, yet, at an age when many are ready to enjoy retirement, they embraced us as their new family. They gave us stability, nurturing, and cultural experiences, taught us to write well, and allowed us to be kids again. Grandpa Irving’s desire to make their home ours was a testament to his love for Grandma. It was the thing he could do to ease her pain.
Grandma Joyce was passionate about literature, art, justice, and our family. She had an irreverent sense of humor and didn’t mind speaking up or ruffling feathers. She loved to travel and always considered the best part coming home. From her I learned how to listen to students and draw out their ideas. Once, after reading a paper I had written in graduate school, Grandma commented, “Honey, this is profound thinking.” Her words meant more to me than any honor or award.
Grandma Joyce was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration the same week that my daughter Ellen learned to read. It was a very short book, but Ellen read it cover to cover, ahead of my finger pointing to the words. She sounded out words she could have guessed from the pictures or from the countless times she’d heard it before. She turned each page eagerly, her eyes full of excitement. She had cracked the code.
The previous year, I had tried not to worry that though her preschool peers were already reading and writing the alphabet, Ellen shared no such interest. When I offered to show her how to write her name, or suggested we could sing the alphabet song together and point to the letters on the poster, she responded simply, “No thanks.” Not surprisingly, the more I suggested, the less interest she showed. The message was clearly: Back off.
“Mom?” She asked out of the blue a few months later, “How do you write ‘Ellen’”? I feigned calm and demonstrated. All of a sudden, learning to print her name occupied much of Ellen’s attention. Often she would call me over to show her the next letter. She did not want me to guide her hand while she formed the letters. She wanted to copy my example. The E’s were often reversed with anywhere from three to ten horizontal strokes, the L’s resembled 7’s, and the diagonal stroke in the N’s went backward, but I could not have been more proud. She didn’t have the idea of writing from left to right, or even in a line. Chanting Pooh-like “E! L-L! E! N!” the letters of her name appeared sprinkled over her paper. As she attempted to read back what she had written she taught herself to print the letters in a row. Ellen continued to politely reject any offer I made to teach her other letters. These were the only ones that held any importance for her. I made up my mind to let her set the pace—there really didn’t seem to be another choice.
One day, as we were driving somewhere, Ellen announced: “Mom! Leaf has a L in it.” Startled, I glanced at her in the rearview mirror, wondering what had prompted this revelation and answered, “Yes it does.” “Letter, has a L in it,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, and proceeded to reel off a list of words starting with L. Was it a coincidence that her name contains two L’s?
In the following days, Ellen recited strings of words starting with T’s, P’s, and B’s. She still couldn’t write or recognize those letters, but she had made a connection between symbols and their sounds. Clearly, she had her own way of doing things. The less pressured, the more her enthusiasm emerged. Ellen embarked on a journey of discovery, first asking how to write particular words for messages like HAPPY BIRTHDAY, or I LOVE YOU, then starting to recognize individual letters (in some order that made sense to her), and practicing her growing sight vocabulary.
The first word that Ellen could really read, other than her name, was BOO, which she noticed in stores at Halloween-time. I suggested that if she knew BOO she might be interested in learning BOOT. True to form, Ellen was pointedly not interested. But when she noticed a sign above a bookstore, she showed me excitedly: “That sign has BOO in it!” Then she sounded out BOOK, and added it to her repertoire.
Throughout the year, Ellen collected words this way—BOO, BOOK, LOOK, MOON, GOOD—at some point I lost track. She added each with great satisfaction. One day she startled herself by reading a friend’s T-shirt. “That says ‘DOG,’” she announced definitively, her face registering surprise and pleasure.
And so, one evening at bedtime, instead of me reading to her, Ellen read aloud to me. Her expression said, “I’m doing it.” When she finished, she commented with a little smile, “Mom, your eyes are all watery.” I was seeing her at a threshold, grasping the magical key to a previously locked door, the door swinging wide to reveal the delightful new world she was about to step into on her own.
At the same time that my daughter’s world was expanding, the door was closing for my grandmother. My tears were as much for her, as they were for Ellen’s accomplishment. My learned grandmother, who had led a life immersed in literature, was no longer able to read words printed on a page. The world of words she loved would never again be accessible to her in quite the same way. It was a loss to be grieved, like the death of a beloved.
As Ellen joyfully entered that world, it felt as if she were embodying her great-grandmother’s spirit: Joyce’s intense love of literature, thought, and expression—her legacy to her great-granddaughter—being reborn. Through her childhood and into adolescence, Ellen carried Joyce’s spirit forward, becoming an actor, poet, musician, and at the age of sixteen, a weaver of words into song. In a year and a half, she wrote forty-eight songs and recorded a dozen, ready to embark on a career as a singer-songwriter. But days after graduation from high school, Ellen’s life crashed to an end on a rain-glazed road.
For a very long time afterward, my first thought each morning as I drifted to the surface of sleep to face the incomprehensible was: “How much longer can I stay here?” Once fully awake, I endured the agonizing hours until I could return to sleep’s sanctuary. Very slowly, that desire for unconsciousness gave way to a willingness, eventually even an eagerness—despite the everlasting anguish—to rise and begin my day; first to remember Ellen’s music, then to play it for others, and now, like Grandma Joyce, to write.
Naomi Bindman is a writer whose articles, essays, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies and journals including Mothering, So to Speak, Friends Journal, Consilience, Import Sky, Honeyguide, Synchroniciti, First Literary Review—East, South Florida Poetry Journal, Lightwood Magazine, and El Portal Literary Journal. She was a finalist in the 2023 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest, and won the 2023 Creative Nonfiction Award from Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. Naomi has received grants from the Vermont Arts Council, taught memoir-writing workshops funded by the Vermont Humanities Council, and is on the faculty of the Vermont State Colleges. Her memoir, You're the Words I Sing, tells the story of Naomi's journey back to life performing the songs of her daughter, Ellen, who lost her life in a car crash at seventeen.
Written by Naomi Bindman
