It was a warm Moroccan evening, the air was still, and everything seemed so peaceful. I was sitting with my mom on a terrace, resting after dinner and listening to the sounds of cicadas. We were talking about my ex-boyfriend, my father and the complexities of love. I don’t remember how we got there exactly. Maybe my mom just needed to get it off her chest, or she felt I was old enough. All of a sudden, the conversation topic changed, and we were talking about my late grandfather.
Dziadzia was my absolute hero, the smartest man in the room, with the most magnetic personality. I remember the name-day parties he would throw every year. Last Saturday of July, one hundred and fifty people gathered to celebrate just him. Making his speech, he would always put me on the spot, and when the party started, he would save me his first dance. I was the apple of his eye; he loved me so much that all his friends were forced to admire me and welcome me everywhere he wished to take me. I was sitting with him through dinners, during football games at the stadium, and even police encounters when he was being served his speeding tickets. Whenever I called, he asked me, “How much is this going to cost?” and got me whatever I wanted. I had my own room in his house, with Winnie the Pooh sheets, and a small bathtub for a little girl. When my parents built their own summer house, my grandpa got me the biggest trampoline and a swing to keep me with him. Every year, he and Grandma would take me on holidays. I was a daughter he was finally ready for and had time to spend with.
When I was seventeen, COVID was slowly ending, and the world was opening up again. My parents went on holiday with my brothers, and I decided to travel with my grandparents. We went to the same place, which they have been taking me to since I was born. Everything was familiar and well known. It was our safe environment. I could walk through the hotel with my eyes closed. I knew everyone, and everyone knew me. The halls, rooms, and restaurant haven’t changed for years. We were the only different thing that had changed.
At dinners, I had to walk with two plates from a salad buffet. I walked my Dziadzia to the restroom when needed and always poured water at a table. I had to hold his hand when walking to the room; he was too scared to get lost, and I was too afraid to let him go. His hands were shaking, and I pretended not to notice when the food fell off his fork straight into his shirt. He sat in the chair right next to the window, trying to catch a glimpse of me on the slopes all day, even though I was on the other side of the mountain. On the drive back to Poland, he observed the road from the passenger seat, stressing that he could not remember the route he had taken a million times before.
When he was fighting COVID, he got infected in that Austrian hotel, he would often call me from the hospital, muttering sentences I could not understand. He screamed on the phone, asking me to hide so that I won’t let them catch me. I was trying to figure out where he got the mad dogs that supposedly were after me. I didn’t know what to say, cause in his head the danger was real. Everyone kept saying he was getting out on Thursday, but I knew the dogs chasing me were the last thing we’d ever discuss. I treated him as a crazy person, knowing that in his delusions, he wanted to save me, and blamed him for not fighting more.
The day he passed away, I woke up at 6:00 in the morning feeling nauseated. Ten minutes later, my masked, ill from COVID mom entered my room. She looked at me with her wet brown eyes, and the tears started slowly running down my cheeks. My father was standing next to her, and he broke the silence saying, “Mom wants to tell you something.” She didn’t have to tell me. I’m not even sure if I’ve heard her saying anything, and I definitely don’t remember them leaving the room. A mountain of stones crushed my chest. I was lying in bed with a heavy load pressing me into the mattress. Even with the heavy weight, I could still breathe and squeeze a little tear. I was calm, but powerless. It took me an hour to lift; I had to move each stone at a time to finally press myself up. I looked into the mirror, put on some black sweatpants and went to school to write my math re-sit exam. In that moment, the only thing that seemed reasonable to me was to live my life like he would want me to live.
Sitting on that Moroccan terrace almost three years after my grandma signed the discontinuation of life support, my mom started talking about her dad. Before that evening, she would only say “I miss my dad,” or “He would have been so proud of you,” or “He loved you so much.” This time it was different. She took a breath, as if she was preparing herself to crash my world, or hers, or ours. “Your grandpa was a severe alcoholic; he could bring himself to the state of delirium.”
The sentence and the look on her face ingrained themselves in my memory. I don’t remember him drinking, ever. He would fill my grandma’s wine cellar and never touch the glass. Is that why he never drank? I asked all these questions; I didn’t want my mom to know that I already knew about his problems, that I’d overheard her talking to my grandma when I was about fifteen years old. I knew it was not his heart that failed, but the uneasy past that killed him. I was supposed to never learn. I thought I knew everything, but that wasn’t even a percentage of the story. That warm evening, my mom was breaking promises she had made to both the dead and the living. She gave a word to never tell, to not put my grandpa in a bad light, and to destroy the fairytale he created around our lives.
That night, my mom crashed her world, leaving mine at peace yet slightly disturbed. The fairytale was a condition for my Dziadzia to ever get to know me. Two weeks before my birth, he went on his drinking binge when the two of them, or three of us, were at his countryside house. I can imagine my heavily pregnant mom hearing the noises in the living room at night. She probably rushed out of her bedroom wearing a loose, flowery night gown, worried for his life and angry with hers. I can’t picture him lying on the floor in a state of delirium with alcoholic heart palpitations. My imagination is incapable of constructing a visualization of my grandpa being sick to the core from the poison he took himself.
I see my mother rushing to the hospital with him, I see her helpless, worried face, with angry eyes full of blame. The day after this nightmarish night, she gave him an ultimatum. I imagine her at his bedside, standing up for herself for the first time in years. She had the strength to take power over him because it wasn’t about them anymore. She could live with the sick and abusive father that fate brought upon her, but she couldn’t bring a baby into that world of hers. She gave him a choice of disulfiram implantation or never getting to meet me. I imagine them in that hospital room. She was taking charge of her own life, forcing him to live and be the way she always wanted him to be. He is trying to negotiate, using his international trade experience to turn a family dispute into a bargaining tool, and attempting to evoke guilt in her for all the money and pleasures he has ever given her. Perhaps at one point she even bent, maybe she looked down at her huge stomach, and looked back at him with fighting fire in her eyes. I don’t know if it was a calm conversation or a real-life Armageddon with third parties involved. I can’t even tell which side my grandma was on. I imagine her wanting to free herself from his problems, while always taking the side of her husband. I know that my father doesn’t know about any of this. I know that my mother was a lioness who fought that war alone.
My grandpa was the first one there to see me on the day I was born. My whole life, I’ve been hearing the story of how nervous he was riding that elevator in Damian’s hospital to see me. He was still working back then, so I can imagine him wearing a perfectly ironed shirt, a red tie, and a well-fitted suit. It was a warm August Monday morning that he reminisced about for many years after that.
I went through life thinking that all the gifts, pleasures and support he gives me are coming from his love and purity. I felt that I was lucky enough to be born into his family, to be a granddaughter of the most incredible man alive. In Morocco, my mom opened herself up to the sounds of cicadas. She didn’t take away his credit; he still was the best grandpa I could ask for. What I saw was the way that my luck was her victory in the war she fought for me. That my dreamlike childhood was an illusion my mom made into a reality.