Essay: On “Her Cigarettes”

If you haven’t yet read the poem, I would suggest you do so first. It can be found in its entirety on this website, at this link.

This is a poem – and an essay – about grief. About family, and how it can be complicated; how history can be, or maybe even must be. Note: discussion of addiction, abortion, death, neglect, and other potentially distressing content.

My grandmother occupies and has occupied a troubled place in my heart. In my memory. I have many thoughts, many memories, many feelings about her – many clash and oppose each other. Not all of them, I suspect, are real. 

This poem mentions several things. Anecdotes from my life, from my grandmother’s, and I don’t know if they’re true. I only know what I remember. 

When I was young, I remember her smoking. She ran a tour company, their primary fare being bus tours from our hometown of Winnipeg – down south of the border, they’d go, to visit casinos, and on the way back home grandma would always visit duty-free and bring back new tobacco. She bought her cigarettes by the carton, and she also bought tubes and shredded tobacco, and I helped her with every part of assembling her own cigarettes except for the final bit: as a young child, I would lay down the thin paper tube in its channel, measure out tobacco beside it and shuffle and tamp it down into its hollow, set the filter in its spot. I had to avoid the sliding mechanism that pressed the parts all together – sharp parts could stab me, moving ones could get my fingers caught, she said, and I might lose them. I’d lose my fingers if I slid the slider.

She was always saying things like that. 

Saying them confidently, reality be damned, and when I was young I thought nothing of it. I took it as truth. I believed her. As I grew, I started to see through the lies to the delusion underneath: she wasn’t just lying, she genuinely believed her bullshit, or at least she seemed to. For a long time, I was bitter about it. Angry. Parts of me still are I think.

I wasn’t there for most of her life. Obviously. I only know what I was told. Stories of how she raised my dad and his two sisters – her and my Opa having divorced after having the kids – and the stories I heard, after I grew up a bit, didn’t endear me to her. At five years old I would be confused by how dad sometimes seemed upset around her. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I heard that she once left him at a mall and drove home. I don’t remember who told me that when security called her, she didn’t pick up the phone, and they had to phone my father’s aunt instead to come pick up the child – don’t remember if I was told he was six years old at the time. I may have invented the details, I may even have invented the entire story. I’m smart enough to recognize the reality of that, the fallibility of my mind and memory: anyone who thinks they know everything and remember everything is an idiot. Human memory is faulty. 

I thought hers was too. That she lied so many times, even to herself, that she convinced herself out of things. Maybe she did. 

I heard other stories of her treatment of my dad. Of the time she asked him to drive her to the airport and he did, only to return home to his father in tears with freshly-opened divorce papers and leading to the sudden realization that his mom was in fact not coming home any time soon. I have heard stories of my dad being sent to live on a farm up north with an uncle, and I know my Opa did not have any brothers that survived the war (rest in peace, great-uncle Theo). I don’t know the specifics. I don’t know that my dad himself does. 

Memories change, you see. 

Stories do, with each retelling and each recollection, and after grandma had died we gathered in Winnipeg and before we set her ashes into the earth we told some stories. Stories about her. 

At first, I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t like her very much at the time, bitter over the way she’d repeatedly abandoned my father, and feeling that that (coupled with his own father’s fairly sudden death at a fairly young age when my dad was in college – which, speaking of, he was seemingly not invited to the funeral for. When I went to the cemetery with him to visit Opa, he had to look up where the man was interred on a map, and yes I understand that it had been years but I have been to several funerals myself. Whatever part of the mind activates with grief seems to direct the feet well upon return, in my experience, but he didn’t know where his own beloved father was twenty years later) was responsible for my dad’s fears over abandonment. Over how upset he would get if I (or mom, or anyone) was out later than estimated. Over how strongly he reacted sometimes to differences of opinion, inflating them into betrayals or abandonment – I love my father dearly, and he has done a tremendous amount of work in dealing with all of this, but he is not a perfect man any more than I am a perfect anything. Any more than my memories are perfect, nor my mind. 

I love him, and I saw that she had hurt him, and that made it difficult to like her very much for quite a while. I saw that she had hurt me too, through lies and addiction to secondhand smoke if nothing else, and that probably contributed some as well.

I didn’t want to speak at the funeral. I didn’t have anything good to say, and wouldn’t have been there at all except for my father. I went for him, and the rest of my family, and not at all for her: to see my family through a difficult time, whilst keeping completely silent about how the loss of an abuser was not really something to be mourned.

Keeping silent, out of respect for them and their mourning, but not her. That was my plan.

Stories were told. Some I knew, partly. My eldest aunt had been born at over eight pounds, less than six months after my grandma got married – a typical example of the lies she’d tell. Every time it was mentioned, she insisted (falsely) that she and Opa hadn’t slept together until the honeymoon. My aunt just grew very quickly. It happens. She’d always say that – “it happens” – as if seeing something in the cover of a dodgy newspaper or the statistically insignificant happening of one outside instance somehow guaranteed viability. As if the fact that a man once fell out of a bomber’s gun turret at fifty thousand feet and survived despite lacking a parachute meant that anyone could jump out of an airplane at altitude (or off of a roof) and be fine; “it happens,” she’d always say, while we rolled our eyes at her. I remember my dad confronting her about it on a few occasions and her sticking to her guns to the last – or, almost.

Almost the last. 

At the funeral, my eldest aunt took the stage, and she looked shaky. Sounded shaky. She had been there with her mom, as grandma’s condition slowly declined – by the end, as I recall, her O2 sats were somewhere one one side of fifty. My memory says 46 or 42, while my mind suggests that 64 or 62 is less absurd, but generally it’s a statistic that shouldn’t be below 90. Probably not below 95 really – it measures how much oxygen is in one’s blood. My aunt had been there over months as grandma’s condition worsened and worsened, and it wasn’t a quick death at all. It took nearly a year, and even standing there with no fondness in my heart for the woman, I felt bad for my aunt who had to watch the mother she’d loved suffer through that.  Even thinking, at that time, that that love might have been a mistake or a waste, I felt bad for her.

My aunt told a story in the form of a letter, written to her mother. Thanking her, and then she explained to the rest of us – in the hospital, grandma had told her something. 

She wasn’t a honeymoon baby. Of course she wasn’t. I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes, but then the story continued and I got thrown rapidly off balance in my practiced cynicism.

My grandma’s parents, who I’d never met, knew about the pregnancy – or at least, some members of her family did. They suggested she go visit their cousins in California before the wedding to my Opa. 

At the time, California was apparently well known as the only place one could get an abortion. They never intended her to visit cousins, or at least not alone. She was supposed to get rid of the baby.

Grandma never went to California. She stayed in Winnipeg, got married, had my aunt and another aunt and then my father. More than just that, she actually remembered, despite her claims over the years – however, that only clarified that they really were lies. My aunt was never a honeymoon baby, my grandma and Opa had sex well before they got married, and everyone knew it and so did she. She just refused to admit to it, until she knew she was going to die. 

Was she too proud? Had she been beaten into submission under the banner of “what should be done” by a life of her own? I don’t know, because I never got a chance to ask her. 

Even if I had, would the answer have been believable? Would I have let myself believe it after years of hearing her words only as lies?

If she’d gone to California, what would have happened? Would she still have gotten married to Opa? Still have had daughter number 2, and then eventually my father third of all?

If she hadn’t abandoned my father in his youth, would he have still fallen in love with my mother? Would he have found someone else, or maybe been less directed toward settling down? I recall mentions of a previous serious girlfriend. I remember a story about a ring in a tin of beans, but I can’t remember if it was a plan or reality – can’t recall either if it was dad or one of his friends. Don’t know whether a prior proposal went badly, or was called off, or something else.

Would I still exist, if grandma had been a different person? If she’d lived a different life, with different successes and failures? 

My grandmother’s sister told stories about how grandma was always a “free spirit”. A spirited child. All sorts of euphemisms from the older days that we now associate with various things; grandma apparently had a dental bridge for nearly her whole life. It replaced four teeth (as I recall) that were lost when she (at age 14, if I recall correctly and the sister giving the story was correct) became convinced she could fly – so to prove it, grandma climbed up onto the roof of the two-storey house and jumped off.

She couldn’t fly. She broke an arm, a few ribs, a leg, part of her skull, and lost the teeth, as I recall being recounted. I didn’t know she had a bridge nor a metal plate repairing her skull fracture. Most of us at the funeral were hearing the story for the first time.

I don’t remember every story that was told. Someone talked about how grandma would always tell you when butter was on sale, and she would. She had over two hundred pounds of it frozen in her house, in various chest freezers, as I recalled. She had canned food that had expired decades before she did. She had five vacuum cleaners fresh in box but was still using the same Electrolux that she’d used when my father was a child. Euphemisms from the modern day that we associate with various things, but also genuine facts of her life. Not the whole of her life, but a part of it. 

I told a story about one of my birthdays. Five, six, seven, something like that – she said she’d buy me a present, whatever I wanted, so we went out to the garage sales. Winnipeg is big for garage sales. I found a radio, and was very excited – I ran up to her. “Grandma look! Fifty cents for this radio! Plus, it can plug in or be run off of batteries! So cool!”

She hummed, flipped the back open, pointed out that there weren’t batteries. She also pointed out there wasn’t a plug – something I had expected to see underneath the cover. I pointed at the front where it said AC power or Battery power – it had a switch that needed to be switched, you see. Looking inside the battery cover, I saw where the plug was supposed to plug in. One of those cables that could be removed entirely – ahead of its time, I should think. 

“Still, it’s only fifty cents,” I remember murmuring, worried that I wouldn’t get the present I wanted because she saw it as broken, but I never minded broken things. I was always good at fixing them. I resonated with broken things even from a young age.

She hummed again, took it up to the person, and asked about it. “Fifty cents?”

They nodded. “There’s supposed to be a cable,” grandma pointed out.

“Lost it a while ago,” the owner replied. “That’s why it’s fifty cents.”

Grandma hummed. “Mm. But. There’s supposed to be a cable…”

She slid a single quarter across the table.

I probably still have the radio downstairs. I told the story and everyone laughed, amidst tears. “That’s grandma,” croaked my Not-California aunt, and everyone agreed. 

That was when I started to see it.

I left two quarters on top of the box of her ashes, which she would have absolutely hated. She didn’t have five vacuums because she was a sentimental woman. She would have been very disappointed and mumbled endlessly about me wasting fifty whole cents on such a pointless gesture, and I do mean endlessly. Years after my father and sibling no longer practiced vegetarianism, Grandma still gave them grief about the fact that they had – the fact that, for one year, exactly, precisely, no more or less, they had not eaten turkey at Thanksgiving (“but it’s Thanksgiving!” She’d proclaimed, then and always. “You’ll have some turkey at Thanskgiving! It’s Thanksgiving!”).

She would have hated me leaving those coins. Hated the waste.

That’s okay. I did it for me, not for her. 

We stayed in her house during our visit for the funeral. I stayed in her room, slept in her bed (or at least, the bed she had used most of her life – she hadn’t told anyone except for me and my wife on a previous trip that she’d mostly moved down to the main floor five years before because her joints complained on the stairs).

The night after the funeral, I woke up at about one a.m. – accounting for the time difference, when I would’ve woken up for my normal early morning shift back home – and I sat in bed. I mulled over a lot, then slipped out of bed and over to where my phone was plugged into the wall, and I wrote the poem.

The smoke soaked into her house was so bad that one of the people staying there – my wife’s and my other partner – nearly had to be hospitalized due to how much it activated their asthma.

I soaked in the smoke too. As a child. As an adult, sitting in her room, thinking about her life and how much of it wasn’t – and realistically never would be – known.

I don’t know what brand she smoked and I don’t want to. She smoked them so often and so regularly that I have become addicted myself. I’m addicted to secondhand smoke. When I get stressed I want a cigarette. Badly. At post-secondary, several of my classmates smoked, and at exam times I always told them not to give me one even if I asked. They chuckled and agreed and asked how long I’d been clean for – my addiction so clear to them that they recognized it as their own.

I’ve never smoked one. Might as well have been born with the addiction.

I wish grandma had been born now. I wish she’d had support in ways she never did, wish she’d had recognition of things. I’m not sure she would have accepted any help, but maybe she would. Eventually she stopped smoking – got laser therapy for it, when the generation after me was born, one of my cousins adamant that her daughter wouldn’t be spending time around anyone who was actively smoking. Grandma quit.

I still have a lot of feelings about her. A lot of thoughts. Maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life sorting them out, but I don’t think so. I don’t think she’s a puzzle to be solved, to me, anymore – she’s an odd, confusing, interesting, maybe even upsetting piece of art. Bosch, perhaps, with his famous triptych. All the things about her, they just are; the piece is painted, the sculpture complete. Bosch won’t be publishing a sequel. He won’t be updating the piece. I might notice a new detail. I might have someone point out a new interpretation. 

I went to the funeral for everyone else, not for her. The bad things she did were still bad, but not only. I’ve heard more stories since: stories about the airport. Stories about her owning a big rig (her dividends from the divorce of husband number two of several) which dad drove through college; I’d known he was a semi driver. I hadn’t known the semi he was driving was owned by grandma. 

I don’t necessarily know what to do with all of these stories, but they still exist. Right or wrong, good or bad, accurate or falsified or misremembered, in whole or in part, they exist. I don’t have to forgive her problematic behaviours in order to empathize with what might have inspired them, I don’t need to forgive her of everything she did in order to love her, and I do love her. I didn’t, I think, when I flew out for the funeral.

I think fifty cents was a worthwhile price to pay for a wider view on things. I’ll debate my grandma’s ghost on that matter any day, and I’ll lose, just like my dad (a trained medical professional) lost every time he tried to insist that eight pound babies don’t come out five to six months after conception.

I don’t need to agree with her on everything, in order to appreciate something. Being thankful to her for California (or rather, for Not California) doesn’t mean I need to forgive her abandoning my dad. Being upset at her for getting me addicted to cigarettes doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the lengths she went to in a world that I am now certain startled and probably terrified her daily. Both can be true. 

Maybe they even are.

It happens.