She held my hand. Frail as she was, her grip was tight.

“Ewa, Ewa, you’re here!” my grandmother exclaimed, looking at me warmly.

“Yes, mama, I’m here.” I lied to her, pretending to be my mother.

“Correct her, tell her you’re not Ewa”, my aunt’s voice carried from the kitchen. She could hear my grandmother and I through the thin wall.

“I will not. Let her have this!” I yelled back. It was unlike me to disrespect an older relative, but in this moment, I did. This mistruth brought joy.

My grandmother’s eyes were soft, loving, and in the fogginess of her mind, she believed she was speaking to my mother. 

“How are the kids?” she asked, naming my siblings and I one by one.

“And Dorotka, how is she?”

“She’s doing so well, you’d be proud”, I spoke of myself as I imagined my mother might have spoken about me if she were alive. She was already gone nineteen years, my grandmother knew this when she was lucid, but when she got confused, Ewa, her middle child, was still alive and had only recently emigrated to Canada. 

I hardly looked like my mother, or so I thought, but to my grandmother I appeared as her child. It pained me to pretend to be Ewa, but it was a kindness I could not deny her.

“The boys are young men now,” referring to my brothers in the present, “and in love, starting their own families. All five of the kids have finished school, they have different professions. They’re scattered across Canada, but still very close.” I was telling my grandmother things my mother never lived to see, her ghost in conversation with us. 

We spoke for a while, jumping from family, to neighbours, to politics, and the cost of food, the cost of bread especially. Whatever I didn’t know, I guessed at, answering her questions in part with fiction and in part with fact. Then, as though something was coming together in her memory, some awareness that not all was well, her smile disappeared as she asked about ‘my’ health.

“Ewa, are you still sick?” she whispered.

“No, mama, I’m not sick anymore. They cut out part of my stomach, the tumours, I had chemo and radiation. They said it’s all gone now, I’ll be well.” I answered, holding back tears, knowing full well the cancer would return and Ewa, my mother, would die. Only I knew the truth in the moment. 

She smiled again hearing ‘I’ was well, then closed her eyes, rolled onto her side and fell asleep. 

I sat beside her, pulling the blanket over her shoulder, tucking her wisps of white hair behind her ears. 

Remembering I had left food on the stove, I went back to the kitchen, checking in on the children who were occupied with painting and colouring at the table. The laundry hung overhead. On rainy days we used the lines in the kitchen, where things dried the fastest, as heat rose from the fire under the pots while we cooked. 

Then I heard her call for me again, this time, asking for Dorotka.

“I’m here.” I said, walking back into her room. “What does grandmother need?”

“Hand me the water.” She sat up in bed. I took the glass off her table and helped her take a sip.

There was a pause, a moment of opportunity, I thought, as she was coherent.

“Grandmother, may I take something with me when I go home?”

“What do you want?”

“This spoon.” I pulled my hand out of the pocket of my apron and showed her a teaspoon I had taken from the drawer in the kitchen when no one was looking. I was careful to speak quietly so my aunt couldn’t hear us. “I know it’s too wide to fit the jam jar, aunty hates it, but I love it. I think it’s different. Maybe I could have it?” There were in theory eight grandchildren who could lay claim to my grandmother’s belongings, but no one came home as often as I did, so I had first dibs. My aunt thought it unfair that I asked my grandmother for keepsakes when ‘the others’ hadn’t had a chance to ask for anything yet. ‘Let them come and ask’ I once answered her, rather rudely, knowing it was highly unlikely. 

“Of course,” my grandmother laughed, “take the spoon. There’s nothing wrong with it you know. If the jar was wider, that spoon would hold more jam than any of the others.” She loved putting jam, marmalade, confiture, on her breath, sometimes into her tea as sweetener. The more the better, she had a sweet tooth despite being a diabetic. 

“I know.” I agreed this spoon was an excellent one for sweet things. We laughed. Her comment about the spoon having nothing wrong with it was a bit of a jab at my aunt, who thought it was poorly designed and had wanted to get rid of it many times. My grandmother forbid it though. She said, ‘this is my home, you can’t get rid of my things.’ My aunt was an imposing person who frequently thought she knew what was better for everyone than what they thought was good for themselves. Between us, grandmother and granddaughter, there was an unspoken understanding; the things my aunt didn’t like, we were immediately more fond of. It was our inside joke.  

She wrapped both her hands around mine and said I should ask for more. 

“Write your name on things you want, when I die, you can take them.” 

“No, grandmother, I don’t need anything else. You’re going to be here a long time; I’m not going to label your home.”

“Besides”, I told her, “I have the letters you wrote to me. Hundreds of them. They’ll be my inheritance.” It was true, I had boxes of letters, her beautiful stories, her memories, newspaper clippings, and photocopies of articles of interest. My grandmother was a master storyteller. Every letter described her daily life as though one had been there to witness it; the weather, the neighbours, the vegetable vendors. She wrote so much and so often, that when she didn’t have a piece of paper to write on, she poured her thoughts onto napkins and the backs of grocery store receipts. Not a single thought was lost. Her mind was brilliant. Before dementia started making her foggy, she often described entire days, if not weeks, in living colour. Other than the first five years or so, which few children remember, she could tell you every detail of the last ninety-four years of her life with an uncanny vividness. 

Knowing she was present with me, and long carrying a question I desperately wanted to return to, I changed the subject. 

“Do you remember our conversation from about eight years ago?” I started. “The one about floor washing? Francis was two years old. You were cutting him apple slices as he played in the living room. You were on the couch; I was sitting on the floor, peeling potatoes. You said, ‘if he is smart, don’t use him to wash the floors’, about any future husband I might have.” 

“Ha, ha, ha, yes, that sounds like something I would’ve said.” She chuckled.

“Do you remember the question I asked you after you said that? ‘What if “she” is smart’?”

“What did I say, what did I tell you?” I couldn’t be certain she didn’t actually remember, she appeared to be searching for the memory, but had no answer. 

‘”Then you better get up earlier to wash the floors.”’ I reminded her of her words, averting my eyes.

“Oh.” Now she too looked away, somber. I could see she was a bit disappointed with herself. 

“Grandmother, do you think it could be different now? If not for me, for the girls? For my kids?” My daughters and son were in the other room with my aunt. The baby was a year old, her sister was four, my son was ten. 

She didn’t answer. We sat in silence, which worried me. Either her mind was drifting away again, as it did whenever it pleased, or perhaps worse, she was trying to find the words to reinforce her previous message. Her beliefs were galvanized, and in them, so too was my place in the world. My place as a woman. 

Nothing weighed on me as heavily as the wisdom of this one person, my grandmother. Her advice had always come from a place of knowing the world in a way I never did; a lifetime of hardships, wars, loss. She had superior survival instincts, and knew when to surrender and when to fight. I revered her just as I felt suffocated by her perspectives. I dreaded the thought that she would give the same advice again as I was trying to find a way to crawl out from under it. I wouldn’t have known how to reconcile it; I would have to assert that I wasn’t going to raise my daughters, my children this way. But disobeying her at the end of her life was the last thing I wanted to do. 

She took a deep breath and looked at me. 

“Yes, maybe it can be different now. You’ve work so hard, look at everything you’ve done. If you can afford it, get help, hire some help, but you keep going.”

It wasn’t quite the liberated feminist perspective I had hoped for, but I understood her. I understood that in her own way, she wanted me to choose a different path. ‘You keep going’, I felt free.

She laid back down, looked away, through me, and we were in the past again. Sometimes that’s what it was like, we only had minutes together. I didn’t mind because when she looked back at me, she saw her middle child, the one who went far across the ocean, the one who had returned to be by her side. She’d forgotten that Ewa died and that she never got to say goodbye. 

Yet again I was fighting back the tears as I transformed into my mother. I patched together my own memories of the way she spoke, the words I knew her to use, and in character, I spent the rest of the afternoon with ‘my mother’. Three generations became two. We talked about what it’s been like living in Canada, still in the early years, trying to make friends, surviving that awful winter, struggling to grasp a language that felt impossible to learn.

My grandmother was so happy our last summer together. She died the following December; the last of our matriarchs.