The drive south was a ritual, a pilgrimage of love, or maybe guilt—depending on the mood. The Suburban packed tight with the family, racing toward the border of memory and obligation. Sometimes, it wasn’t even about them. Sometimes, I just threw a bag into my Mustang and burned sixteen hours of highway alone, chasing ghosts, chasing her. My grandmother. The only woman who ever loved me without a contract attached.
She was always “dying.” It was a game we played. Me on the other end of the line, standing outside the barracks in San Diego, tears welling up as I pictured her funeral. She on the other side, rolling her eyes before delivering the same line she’d used since I could walk.
“Mijo, I’m not feeling well. When are you coming to see me? I’m dying.”
She was in her fifties then, but she carried the weight of a woman three decades older.
One time, I rented a convertible Mustang and decided to take her out like some kind of second-rate Jackie Kennedy. I wrapped a scarf around her neck, threw some oversized sunglasses on her, and we hit the Pacific Coast Highway. The wind turned her into a queen, her frail fingers clutching the door like she was on her way to a goddamn royal ball.
We stopped in Long Beach, where she immediately pointed to an old building. “That’s where Uncle Brown got married,” she said, like it was yesterday. She could tell you the gargoyle count on the facade, could probably name them if you gave her a minute.
We crossed the Vincent Thomas Bridge into San Pedro, marveled at the Queen Mary like it was still in motion. Then we wound our way to Lakewood Mall, where she dragged me into some boutique straight out of a black-and-white film. It wasn’t JCPenney. No, this place smelled like old money and perfume, a shrine to women who still wore gloves and believed in the sanctity of a well-made dress. I sat in a little waiting area where they served cookies and tea—because of course they did—and watched her light up like a kid in a candy store. She picked out a new outfit, matching scarf, sunglasses—like she was about to meet Sinatra for cocktails.
The drive home was quiet, just the hum of the road and the sound of her holding onto the moment.
She was good at that. Holding on.
Eventually, time caught up with her. She started crawling on her hands and knees because her legs weren’t worth a damn anymore. She fell constantly, refused help. I hired a cleaning lady to make her life easier, but she turned her into a villain. “She’s stealing from me,” she said. “I don’t like the way she looks at me.”
Independence is a hell of a drug.
Eventually, the family pooled the money, sold the house, and put her into a care home. Visiting her there felt like slow-motion euthanasia. She’d grip my hand like a child and plead, “Mijo, get me out of here.”
I wanted to.
She stopped speaking English, abandoned it completely like it had never served her. We started blending Taco Bell into paste because the food was garbage and dignity was already in short supply. The room was a waiting room, the world shrinking down to the space between the walls.
Then they decided to honor her as the oldest person in Norwalk. A plaque. A photo op. Some cheap dignity stapled onto the end of a long life.
I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. Just drove down, walked into my cousin’s house in La Mirada, where the driveway spilled over with cars. Forty, fifty people inside, a mix of actual relatives and hanger-ons. I walked in, and everything went silent. Some cousin I barely remembered broke the tension.
“Jaime!”
And then the murmurs. Recognition. But not familiarity.
It wasn’t a family gathering. It was a goddamn festival. My cousin’s husband’s family—all eleven of his siblings, their kids, their in-laws—had hijacked it. I was standing in the middle of a landscaping convention, feeling tall, white, and out of place.
Grandma sat in a wheelchair, hollowed out. Staring. I hoped she knew me.
When it was time to sing Las Mañanitas, the crowd leaned in, the cake, the candles, the moment. She didn’t move. Didn’t blink. And then, when they switched to Happy Birthday in English, she finally smiled. Blew out the candles.
That was it. That was the last spark of her.
Driving home, I knew. That was the last time I’d hold her hand, the last time I’d kiss her cheek. She’d been given a plaque and a room full of strangers. That was her send-off.
She died in the middle of my divorce, the whole damn thing playing out like a soap opera in front of anyone who cared to watch. My aunt called. “The funeral is on Saturday. Her youngest daughter is giving the eulogy.”
Of course she was.
The same aunt who had systematically erased us from my grandmother’s life. Who had wallpapered every inch of that house with her own photos while ours sat buried in a drawer. Even the digital frame I’d given Grandma—filled with pictures of my kids—had been gutted, replaced with her own memories.
I didn’t go.
The funeral wasn’t about Grandma. It was about performance. About ownership. About people staking their claim on a woman they hadn’t even loved properly.
I kept my grief private.
I didn’t need a funeral to remind me of her. I had the memory of that day in the Mustang. I had the way she made her beans. I had the gin rummy games, the way she’d laugh when she won. I had the knowledge that, no matter what those people did, no matter how many times they tried to rewrite history, she had loved me.
And she knew I loved her.
That was enough.
