Matriarch

(Mentions of child abuse, and inter-generational trauma)

A dark wood entertainment center sits unused in a living room with no source of light other than the broken sliding glass door, shielded by the awning of a hurricane-weathered porch. Inside the entertainment center (where a heavy box television once belonged) is now a cluttered mess. Amongst the Wi-Fi router, and an unused generator, is white heart shaped box. 

It is deep enough to hold all the burnt and dehydrated molecules of a human being. The box is empty, now. But you remember who it was meant to contain. 

Una Catling was the kind of old lady who has always been an old lady. She wore symmetrical features on her face, the suggestion of beauty. On those features, thick glasses. You tried them on once. You couldn’t imagine something as blinding as those glasses could actually help someone see. The jokes on you, now. Your vision grows worse every day and you wear your own pair of octagonal frames. This is not about you, though. This is about Una. Her face was weathered with age since before you were born.

Una Catling was, in fact, a young woman once. She learned to sail with her little sister, Nina. Both were blondes, often mistaken for twins. You only remember them with bobbed white hair. At the funeral you peered into the photo that served as the only evidence of a youth you would never witness. 

Una was shown kindness by your Great Grandpa Catling, who she still called daddy even in a day and age where the world has perverted it. She spoke fondly of her memories and her youth, and how he doted upon them. She held the kind of forgiving love for him that you see in your relationship with your father. 

Their father, you are told, was an eccentric businessman from Pennsylvania. He took them to Cuba, once, before Cuba was closed off to the world. Una would often tell you of this in the way that the elderly tend to repeat themselves (you notice this characteristic repeating in your mother more frequently now, and you pray with childish futility for your parent’s immortality).

Both girls were a product of a second marriage to your great grandmother. You are also told that your great grandfather would bring his first wife to all business meetings. 

There is rumor in your family that Una’s father married again because his first wife could not bare children. At some point, your great grandmother, feeling used, remarried to a man named Oscar. 

Oscar loved Nina and your great grandmother, who took his last name. Now you only know your Great Grandmother as Grandma Price, but you do not know Oscar—other than his heinous crimes against a pure soul, undeserving of suffering.

Una would only whisper this with shame to her daughters, who would pass down this knowledge to you in hushed whispers. Una was not silent; she told your Grandma Price. Your Grandma Price must have really loved Oscar, because she stayed with him. 

Una was conditioned to want a husband, a house, a backyard with a dog in it, and a boy and girl. She imagined a home with Betty Crocker, creased and annotated, eternally open on a counter by a stove. She wished for a husband full of love, devotion, and food. 

The man she married did the one thing worthy of her hatred. He forced himself upon their daughter. She filed for divorce as soon as she found out.

That horrible man, your grandfather, is now blind in Virginia. He remarried to a woman who is sweet like Una was. He claimed to have felt something overwhelm him at the time of her passing. He would make it about himself, wouldn’t he? He outlived her. But perhaps he deserves more time in Hell for what he did.

The man’s daughter has forgiven him. You have not. Not for what he did to her. Not for how his parenting affected her parenting. Suffering is an heirloom (You do not think he is the root of that suffering, you think it was your Jewish great grandmother. Apparently, your mother inherited her difficult personality… and your mother is named Karen).

When your grandfather left, was it in shame? Disgrace? No, he left out of selfishness. He wrote a book about his life, and he is successful (when you pursue writing, it is in spite of him—not to connect with him, despite the gap your mother consistently tries to bridge). He received no punishment for his crimes. He was a young twenty something, free to go find himself upon divorce. 

Una, alternatively, was forced to work nights as a hospice nurse to support three children. Betty Crocker remained in the kitchen, but gathered dust in favor of spaghetti and other meals. 

Maybe this is why Una forgave her mother. She bought the house across the street from her. Perhaps it was out of necessity. It takes a village for one. It takes a grandmother for three.

You remember your Great Grandma Price in the cotton ball of her hair and her spherical glasses that turned her face into something of a praying mantis. 

You also remember Grandma Price by her home. Nothing too detailed—the adults sitting by the red (or was it green?) painted picnic table as you swam with a noodle, always supervised, in the kidney shaped pool. Everyone was taller, and the sunshine was vibrant in a way that it isn’t now. 

Your mother always told you about how she would go spend entire summers in over at that house with the kidney shaped pool, without having to share attention with her siblings. It’s easy to imagine. Grandma Price would buy her all the junk food she wanted. 

Your mother says you inherited your Great Grandma Price’s breasts. You do not remember that in a way where it could be considered a compliment. When you look in the mirror at 23 and see they are already beginning to sag, you think you understand, in some mortifying way, that this perceived youth and early degeneration is just the nature of our reality. 

Later you would inherit Grandma Price’s dedication to living a clean life. She grew her own garden and ate vegetarian meals. You can still taste her homemade bread. There was a seed in it that gives it a pungent and sweet flavor. You suspect you would never have met your great grandmother if she did not change her lifestyle so drastically.

You forgive her for ignoring the cries of her daughter.

Your memories of Una Catling are colored with the brilliancy of a pure childhood. The memories of her taste like orange soft serve. You remember your sticky hand in Una’s warm wrinkled one, crossing the street.

You remember the orange grove in the back of Una’s house. They became tangerine trees as Una’s wrists got smaller. Before she died, the trees were stumps, but not after enjoying hundreds of Florida afternoons under their shade. 

You believed that Grandmothers lasted forever, and that the smell of that house and that musty shag carpet would always have a place in your life. A universal constant. The only constant in this universe is change.

…How to remember a life? How to remember someone who only ever showed you kindness and compassion? It is not enough to say an angel. Angels are terrifying, anyways. No… Una was the best of us. An incarnation of a goddess. She ought to have been a goddess of rage. She was instead a goddess of eternal motherhood. 

She quit her job the day you were born, to be a babysitter to you and your cousin Matthew, who never learned to walk. You both outlived him. Una believed him to be the reincarnation of her fourth child. The one she could not financially shoulder.

Una played the violin, though you never saw it. She read in a romance novel that a girl who looked like her played the violin, and received appropriate male attention because of it. You never saw her play the violin, despite knowing she could, because she had a cavity in her brain ate at her motor functions. A monster, all-consuming and horrid. Parkinson’s.

One day she fell. You weren’t able to communicate in a meaningful way with her after that. You remember distinctly thinking that she was dead, before she was dead. If you could go back in time you would hold her hand in that shitty government nursing home, where they send people to die and pretend like they don’t. You want to tell her how much you love her and really, truly, deeply and selflessly mean it.

You were in college, then. You were wrapped up in you. Had no room for something as small as your Meme dying. 

The funeral home exploited your family as it exploits all grieving families, though the ceremony was decent. Your cousin Samantha, who was not present for the dying process, spoke. You did not speak. You remember distinctly thinking that Samantha didn’t know Meme, because Samantha grew up in Utah, safely away from your mother, and alienated from Meme. Every time you see Samantha it is like meeting a stranger all over again. Now you know that Samantha is a good, dutiful person, though. She has matriarch energy. She inherited that from her mother, and from Una. 

You want to think you are good and dutiful, but you were not raised in a whole family, or with religion. You’ve had to find religion on your own terms. 

Thinking of the funeral, you are reminded of the giant white heart shaped box that was supposed to have Meme’s ashes in it. Your mom still has it. They hadn’t actually burned her yet, by the time of the funeral, so it sat there empty while she sat on a cold slab and we celebrated her life.

You were very numb to the whole event. You thought you knew everything, back then. About death, and grief. 

Aunt Nina was at the funeral, so close to Meme. Mot her. A ghost. Her husband stood beside her, Uncle Dale. A good, dutiful husband. They had one child and a mansion. Something Meme deserved. 

As sisters they were always united in some way, when you saw them. There was an understanding there, of fate and destiny. Being born to the same parents is no guarantee of a similar outcome in life. They were happy in their own ways.

Meme learned to be content with the hand she was dealt. She went on walks with your mother on the beach. When you were going through puberty and hated exercise, you would sit with her on Indian Rocks Beach while she caught her breath and mom carried on, trying to make up for all the ice cream she did not intend to eat a night later. 

Una… An elephant matriarch, wrinkled and powerful and wisened with the experiences life forced upon her. Leader of a family. Her death lead to the fallout of her children, as the death of matriarchs tend to do. 

But she said goodbye. She cried at that last Thanksgiving at her house, because she knew, and you knew, but pretended you didn’t. And then, after the funeral you made your peace with death in a way that connected you to death again. 

Suffice to say, you eavesdropped on a final conversation, and found evidence that there is life beyond death when they spread her ashes. 

She was in the clouds in the sky, the mushroom on the ground, and the dolphins in the waves. 

It would be wrong to remember somebody simply for everything that was done wrong to them, everything that overwhelmed and burdened them. You dwell on the pain, because you believe immense suffering tempers a person’s resolve to be kind. 

Una would hand-write you letters. She would draw these borders with vines and butterflies and it was so cute. You were too busy being cool and trying to figure out who you were. You never wrote back.

She told you simple stories. Una made a tale of the family of sparrows nestled in Grandma Price’s garage. Stories of the turtle that dug a hole under her fence to reach the creek out back behind the yard.

Una Catling also told you of her neighbor’s butterfly garden. And of the story of the butterfly. Wrapped in paper towels, placed carefully in an old striped red and pink heart box, there is an old chrysalis. It is used and grey and shriveled. She saved it.

The butterfly is long dead now, and so is Una, but the cocoon sleeps in the corner of your room, in that heart-shaped box, a memory.

The box is constructed of wood, not cardboard, like her white heart urn. Both these boxes will return to the earth someday, but Una returned to the sea of her youth.