You know, you spend your whole goddamn life wading through a world of beautiful, ugly, and completely fraudulent bullshit, and you forget what a real, honest-to-God thing looks like. My grandmother, Bertha, she wasn’t like the rest of that fucked-up family. She was from Spain. Her voice was soft, a quiet, European sound in a house full of loud, American chaos, a house full of my mother’s screaming and my aunt’s quiet, backstabbing poison.
Her whole life was that goddamn kitchen. It wasn’t just a room; it was the only honest country I’d ever known. It smelled like delicious food, like real, honest-to-God substance. It smelled like safety. A kind of safety I’ve been chasing in the bottom of a bottle and in the beds of strange women my whole goddamn life, and never found again.
And her love… Christ. It was the only goddamn unconditional thing I’ve ever tasted. The kind you’re supposed to get from a mother, the kind they write all the bullshit songs about, but the kind you rarely ever goddamn get. With everyone else, there was an angle, a catch, a quiet, respectable invoice at the end of the month. With my mother, it was “I’ll love you if you’re my ‘golden boy’.” With my father, it was “I’ll love you if you’re a good, quiet soldier.” With Bertha? It was just… there. No judgment. No performance review. She just looked at me, a feral, fucked-up little kid, and she saw a king.
Her hands, they weren’t the hands of a fighter. They were soft. But they weren’t weak. I watched those hands my whole goddamn life. I watched them in her 50s, her 60s, her 70s, as they wrinkled up, turning into beautiful, honest raisins. By the time she hit a hundred, they were just bone and skin, a quiet, delicate, beautiful map of a century of just… breathing. A century of absorbing the chaos of the rest of us.
But she wasn’t some goddamn porcelain doll. She wasn’t a “nice” woman. She was real. I remember me and my brother, two beautiful, stupid, and completely feral animals, just tornadoes of testosterone and bad decisions. We were wrestling in her living room, a place that was usually quiet, and we broke one of her goddamn chairs. A leg just cracked. And we did what little con artists do. We rigged it. We jammed it back together, put it in the corner, and didn’t say a goddamn word. Two years. Two whole goddamn years that chair sat there, a quiet, ticking time bomb.
And then one day, she found it. She was moving it to clean, and the whole goddamn lie just fell apart in her hands.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t “talk about her feelings.” She didn’t hit us with that passive-aggressive, manipulative bullshit my mother and my aunt were so goddamn good at. No. Bertha, this quiet, hundred-pound, eighty-year-old Spanish woman, she went to the closet, and she grabbed a goddamn broom. And she came after us, a beautiful, honest, broom-wielding fury, chasing us out of the house, whacking our little asses, screaming at us in a language we couldn’t understand but a tone we goddamn well respected. Chasing us out like the dogs we were. It was the most real, the most honest, and the most loving goddamn thing that had ever happened to me.
She was the shock absorber for the whole goddamn broken-down family machine. She just stood in the middle of the kitchen, this quiet, permanent, and completely necessary axis, and she just… “ate” the turmoil. My mother’s rages, my aunt’s quiet, serpentine poison… she just took it. A thankless, beautiful, and completely necessary job.
But the end… Christ. The end is what sticks in your gut like a dull, rusty knife.
I’d go see her in that quiet, respectable, piss-smelling nursing home. A hundred years old. A goddamn skeleton in a bed. And she’d hold onto my hand with those little, bony, raisin-skin hands, and this woman, this beautiful, solid, and completely honest rock of unconditional love… she would cry.
She’d beg me. For my goddamn forgiveness.
She had this idea in her head, this beautiful, ugly, and completely fraudulent story, that she was “hard on me.” That she’d been the one who “forced me” to join the Navy. That all the chaos, all the running, all the beautiful, ugly shit that made me who I am, that it was her fault.
And I just… I’d sit there. And I’d tell her, “Grandma, I am the man I am because of you.” But I don’t think I ever really said it. Not in the way she needed to hear it. Not with the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest truth that was sitting right in my goddamn chest.
I never told her that she wasn’t the one who forced me out. I never told her that she wasn’t the one who broke me.
I never told her that she was the goddamn armor.
She was the one, clean, beautiful, and completely honest thing in a world of liars. She was the only reason I survived the war of my own goddamn family in the first place. She was the most profound human being in my whole goddamn, fucked-up life.
And now she’s gone. And I’m sitting here, a 57-year-old bastard, in a new shithole, finally understanding it.
And that, right there… that’s the one beautiful, ugly, and completely honest regret that a man just can’t drink away.
