Over the course of our lifetime, we may receive meaningful mementos from loved ones that can change our lives. Now that I am in my late sixties, and have lost many loved ones, I’ve been blessed with some meaningful mementos.
For me, the two most meaningful mementos were from my maternal grandmother, who blessed me with four needlepoint chairs she’d made when she was in her forties, and her retrospective journal depicting her life as an orphan in Poland during the First World War. Her parents died of cholera when she was 11 years old (about the same age I was when she took her life with an overdose of sleeping pills in my childhood home). She then moved to Vienna and married my grandfather before immigrating to the United States, seven years after my mother was born.
After my grandmother died, my parents continued to live in my childhood home for 30 more years. When it came time to pack up and move, they stumbled across my grandmother’s journal. She wrote about the challenges of growing up without parents and having to go to school, work and take care of her own domestic responsibilities.
In view of my close relationship with my Grandma, my mother gifted me the journal. Only after reading it did I fully understand the deep roots of my Grandma’s depression, which tormented her during her entire life, and eventually led to her suicide at the age of 61.
I had tucked the journal away until many years later when I was diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to see if she’d committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis. She died in the 1960s—a time when discussing cancer was considered taboo.
Learning to type
Although I found out that she did not have cancer, while reading her journal I felt reconnected with her through her words. I was reminded of how she taught me to type on her black Remington typewriter perched on the vanity in her room, and how the experience planted the seeds of my writing passion.
“Have a seat,” she’d said on that momentous day, pointing to her vanity chair. “Typing is a handy skill for a girl to have. Plus, you never know what kinds of stories you’ll have to tell one day.”
She stood behind me, her image reflected in the mirror in front of me. She took my right hand and positioned it on the second row of keys from the bottom, carefully placing one finger on each letter, repeating the same gesture with my left hand.
“This is the correct position for your fingers. When you become a good typist, you won’t even have to look at the letters while typing. Let’s see if you can type your name.”
With my left middle finger, she had me press on the “D.” Then we moved to the right middle finger and moved up a row to type an “I.” Then my pinkie pressed the “A,” and then something really tricky had to happen—I had to move my right thumb down to the bottom row to type an “N.” Then my left pinkie typed an “A.” After each letter, I glanced up at the paper to see the results of my efforts. After reaching the last “A,” I proudly looked up at my grandmother’s face in the mirror.
Those typing lessons formed the basis for my lifelong commitment to the written word. Years later, when working on my M.F.A. in non-fiction writing and trying to figure out the best subject for my thesis, I pulled out her journal. The idea came to me that since she was my caretaker from infancy until her passing when I was 10, wouldn’t it be a wonderful idea to weave our lives and her effect on my writing career?
Writing my first memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal was a transformative experience in that I had a chance to reconnect to her from her words. It’s not often that we are given these types of gifts, but when we are, it’s important to cherish them like the sun we awaken to every morning.
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image 1 Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay 2 image by Jerzy Górecki from Pixabay
