It rained nonstop in April 2019. And it was not lovely warm rain; it was the kind that soaks through your jacket, flies in sideways under your umbrella, and chills your bones. The constant rain and gray skies had convinced me that spring’s splendor would never arrive in New York. I was dreaming of hyacinths and praying for sunshine. Instead, I lived in a world of mud and drizzle.
In the first week of May, the rain was still going strong. My mother came to pay a quick visit to Barbara and me and Mila and Poppy. My girls were beside themselves with excitement. I was, too. There is nothing quite like having your mother around when you are pregnant and in need of comfort. So that we would have the most time together possible, I’d talked her into coming on Today with me.
The car picked me up at five in the morning. As we drove through the rain-soaked streets of the still-dark city to the studio, I thought, I hope all this rain is good for the flowers. Where the hell are the flowers, anyway? I was pregnant, hormonal, and grumpy. The rain matched my dour mood.
Once at work on the set next to my mother, who was beaming and looking graceful in a navy jacket over a white blouse, I shook off the morning’s gloom.
We went live and Meredith Vieira asked my mother about the new baby.
“I’m thrilled about the new boy!” she said. “Of course George and I are just thrilled to have another grandchild. As George says, grandchildren are the wonderful part about old age, the reward for old age!”
“And you can give them back when you’re done,” quipped Meredith.
My mom and I joked about how her friends in Texas used to sit around and talk about their medicines. Now they talk about their grandchildren.
Meredith said, “You go from hemorrhoids to grandkids basically!”
My mother, ever the southern lady, said, “Well, we never talked about those.”
Meredith changed the subject. “What do they call you?”
“Grammee,” said my mother. “That’s what Barbara and Jenna called my mother and what I called my grandmother.” We added that my girls call my father “Jefe,” Spanish for “chief.”
By the time we walked out of the studio, the weather had changed. It was now a bright, beautiful day in midtown Manhattan. At long last, the sun had come out. The sidewalks were packed. I noticed tulips beginning to peek out from the soil on a median and daffodils starting to open in a window box.
“I cannot believe how many people are on the streets,” my mother said.
“If you knew how gross the weather has been, you wouldn’t be surprised!” I said.
We picked up Mila early from kindergarten. She asked my mom if she could spend the night at her hotel, and my mother said of course. Mila had never been more excited—a sleepover with her grandmother—and on a school night, no less! It was like Christmas in May.
When we got home, Poppy was napping soundly.
My mother kept asking, “When can we wake up Poppy?”
That was just what her father, my Pa, did when we were little girls sleeping in our cribs. He would come to our house in Midland, Texas, fling open our bedroom door, and yell, “Laura, are the girls up yet?”
Our eyes would pop open and we’d yell “Pa!,” a word easy for toddlers to learn, then stand up and stretch out our arms, begging him to lift us out of the crib so we could start playing.
I imagine that my mother, a flustered parent of twin girls, wasn’t a fan of that method of ending naps, but we loved waking up that way. And now my mother, so much like her own father, doted on her grandchildren. When I had my back turned for two seconds, I heard Poppy squealing with joy as she woke to find her Grammee and her big sister banging around in her room.
The girls were delighted their grandmother was there to give them undivided attention. They were playing with the vintage Barbie suitcase she’d brought them when my mother’s phone rang. It was a family friend in Texas.
“That’s funny,” my mother said. “I wonder why Elaine is calling.”
She took the call into the next room.
“Hello? Elaine?” I heard her say. “Is everything okay?”
Then I heard silence.
“How is she feeling?” my mother said. “Is she eating?” Silence again. Then: “Oh. I see.”
She hung up the phone and returned to Mila’s room. “I’m sorry, I have to go,” she said. “Grammee—my mom—is dying. I need to fetch my bag and get on the next plane to Dallas.”
Mila and Poppy both burst into tears. They had met their great-grandmother, but she’d had dementia for a decade, so they never really got to know her as she was.
“Elaine said the end-of-life doctor has come to the retirement community,” my mother told me as I tried to console the girls.
What an odd term retirement community is, I thought—one often has odd thoughts in moments of crisis. At ninety-nine, Grammee had been retired for forty years. Her mind had been retired for the better part of a decade.
“We were supposed to have a slumber party!” Mila said, suddenly indignant. “We were going to dinner with Auntie Barbara!”
“Grammee is feeling sad because her mother is sick,” I said. “Her mommy needs her. You understand that, don’t you?”
Mila did not understand. Like any small child whose promised delights have been withdrawn, she was disappointed. Then she started crying again and said, “Mama, why does everybody we love die?”
Oh, perhaps she did understand. It was a very good question, one for which I did not have an answer. I didn’t know what to say.
While my mom rushed to get her things together, Mila called out, “Wait, Grammee! Don’t leave! Wait! I need to give you something!”
My mom stood at the elevator door, and Mila ran over, holding out a stick figure drawing of her great-grandma, her name written in lopsided script.
“I want to give you this picture of your mom to make you feel better,” Mila said.
My mother hugged her. “Thank you very much, Mila,” she said. “I love it, and every time I look at it, I will feel better.” Then the elevator doors closed and she was on her way back to Texas.
As soon as she was gone, Poppy broke into hysterical sobs. Lying at the elevator door, she said over and over, “Grammee, Grammee, Grammee.”
I carried her to the couch, knowing she had been scared by the urgency she heard in her grandmother’s voice. I also knew that she was sad for good reason. Her mom and aunt were about to lose their only living grandparent. Another huge loss—our third in the span of a year.
The next morning on the subway to school, Henry helped Mila send a text to my mom that said:
We love you and your mom. Is she okay? We want to see her in July for her 100th birthday. Love, Mila
The text was decorated with a birthday cake, a cat-face emoji, a little girl, a baby, and a detective.
As I waited to hear from my mother after she landed in Texas, I thought back over Grammee Jenna’s life. On her first date with my grandfather, they went dancing at the Tivoli nightclub in Ciudad Juárez, she in a bright red dress. They married at Fort Bliss before he went to war. She never graduated from college, but when she was older she took community college classes until her eyesight failed. When she first developed dementia after Harold died, she cried in the night for her husband, asking where he was. I found some solace in the knowledge that they would soon be reunited.
When Barbara and I were born, our names were assigned alphabetically, perhaps as a nod to my mother’s librarian instinct or possibly courtesy of our parents’ diplomatic nature. Barbara was named after Ganny because she was the first to emerge. When I appeared only minutes later, I was named Jenna Welch Bush, after my mom’s mom.
In those days, we called our grandma Jenna “the nice one,” because in comparison Ganny seemed so strict. There were no rules posted in Grammee Jenna’s house. During the day she let us make messes, and at night she taught us all the constellations in the sky. She lay in bed with us, lulling us to sleep with a discussion of our menu for the next morning’s breakfast—a meal we always ate outside in sight of the birdfeeders before the day became unbearably hot.
“Let’s see,” she would say. “We will have apricots and bacon and toast and . . .” We would talk about what the next day would be like as our eyes grew heavy and we drifted off to sleep. At Grammee’s house, we always fell asleep excited for the day to come.
In many ways I’m like my Ganny, but I wish I were more like my namesake, Jenna. She was thoughtful and gentle. Watching her brain deteriorate and seeing her lose her radiant curiosity had been painful. But she never lost her kindness. She came to our wedding. Soon after, I went to Midland and sat with her, and she said, “I’ve got to find you a nice boy!”
“Grammee, you were just at my wedding!” I said.
“There are some nice boys in Midland!” she said, not hearing me. “Who can we introduce you to?”
When she met newborn Mila, she said, “Who is this beautiful baby?” Without ever quite realizing that this was her great-granddaughter, she kept saying, “Pretty baby, pretty baby.”
In her later years, she would sometimes look out her window and say, “Do you see those kiddos playing in the yard? Look at those kiddos.” Only she saw the playing children.
I wonder now—and maybe it’s because I hope it to be true—if those were her babies, the ones she lost, calling her home.
My mom texted me to say the flight had landed and she was heading to the car. She said Grammee was still conscious.
I wonder if Grammee is waiting for you before she lets go, I wrote back.
My mother was her only child. She was her everything. I couldn’t help thinking she would want more than anything to say goodbye. While my mother ran to her own mother’s side, Mila cuddled up to me and uttered the phrase so often spoken by Robin: “I love you more than tongue can tell.”