Purple Memories: For My Grandmother

She said, “To LOVE as we do; to FEEL as we do--is to be alone.”

I was on the phone with her, 24 years old, telling her I was leaving my husband. It doesn’t matter the exact words, I remember how we felt. WE. How we understood each other at that moment. A deep, wordless understanding and knowingness. I still to this day cannot remember whether she said “to love” or “to feel,” it’s the same thing to me. I know what she meant. Married and truly in love over 70 years, and I heard the loneliness in her. The alienation. She felt different. We always had felt different.

I was 8 years old, I said something big, something too much to the people in the other room, and she drew me aside into the red room. The one with red carpet with black swirls. And she was straight with me, she never did talk down to me. She looked at me, purple-blue eye to teal-eye. I don’t remember the exact words, but I know what she said.

“You see the truth, it burns in you. But sometimes, people are not ready to hear the truth. And the biggest challenge you will face is learning when to speak the truth and withhold it. Not everyone sees it. But we do.”

And we looked at each other, Bette-Davis eyes to Bette-Davis eyes and understood each other. We often did. We had this same thing, we could look at people and it made them uncomfortable; because our eyes were so big and so open, that they felt we saw everything in them—and maybe in some sense we did.

She saw that in me. One day, she took my hand and guided me to the back bedroom with white shag carpet. A black and white photo was on the mantel; her and her brother with her Grandmother. She pointed to her, 8-year-old me at her side and said “See, you look just like I did. We look the same.”

I knew she meant we were the same.

She saw it, just, knew me. These bones of mine, I’ve changed in views and grown, but she looked at me with those round, large, omniscient eyes and saw me. That me that still is the same. And I looked up at her and saw the same. We didn’t need to say much. She smelled like healing, purple, lavender. I don’t know what I smelled like to her, just that I was familiar to her.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table across from her when the rest had gone to the white room, and we were talking; she kept up with me and I kept up with her—wit for wit. And she eyed me and said, “You are all Callaghan: all Irish.” I looked at her sideways and smiled that way. Our eyes changed a lot, and our eyes were green that moment.

She told me I had purple and green in my hands. That I could do what she did. That I could see truth, and heal too. That I had her gift of purple, and I had to be careful, because if I gave too much, I’d get dry and bitter.

Although without physical sight, she told me when she died, she would give me her sight; the intangible sight she had not lost--the purple in her.

She often held my hands and we shared the purple. She taught me how to temper my words, reserve my truth and know when to speak it. How to give my healing and when to keep it away.

Sadly enough, as much as she loved Grandpa, she taught me to hold my love and feeling close to me; because no one ever understood her; no one ever understood.

I knew when she was going to die. I knew the day and hour. I didn’t go that evening to see her, because I knew it wasn’t her and I knew she wouldn’t have wanted me to see that.

I’m not someone who wakes. But I woke up in one exact moment. She was gone. I laid there on my side for a while.

I got the text, she had passed.

I already knew. I had woken the moment the last breath left her.

Something was taken from me, deep inside my chest; but something was given too.

Now she is gone, and I can see the purple too.

2021

Image Courtesy of: Photo 41972069 © Nikki Zalewski | Dreamstime.com