Remembering Harriet De Lima

I should start this by saying my grandma passed damn near almost 20 years ago. But I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to grieve her properly then.

It took a long time for me to be comfortable enough about myself to accept myself and only then was I really able to accept other people. And even more time after that, to love myself and really able to love other people unconditionally.

I’m probably not any more emotional now than I was when I was a kid. But I am able to express myself in less toxic ways and understand I don’t need to say every single thing that pops into my mind. And I can’t pretend that today I am a perfectly good, wholesome person. I still have toxic thoughts, toxic ideas and beliefs. It’s just much much easier for me now to identify them and work through them.

I’m 40. 40 and a half. To the day actually now that I think about it. But I’ve probably been a good, decent person, not even a really great person, just better than meh really, for five or six years.

I’m an only child. And the stereotypes were true, especially in my youth. I was a selfish little shit, a bit of a narcissist and I ran roughshod over my family. And really it peaked all through my childhood.

My mom and I lived with my grandparents from when I was about 2 to 12. My grandma would always cry when watching TV. Bonanza. Columbo. Matlock. Little House on the Prairie. Murder, She Wrote. Anything really. And I would tease and tease her. On some old school toxic masculinity type shit. Like “WHY are you always crying??? What are you crying about now?” Like I said, I was a really delightful child, we’re talking maybe eight years old with a real mouth on me.

I’d pretend to cry and she’d cry more or I’d make an exaggerated sobbing face and it’d make her cry more. I would just torment her constantly. It was a game to me.

One of my last memories being with her, I went to visit my grandparents when I was 13 in Hawaii. This was the summer after my mom and I moved from Lompoc, California to Virginia (only about 4 months after moving actually) and about one year after my grandparents moved from CA to Kailua, Hawaii.

So I’m visiting them for an entire summer. Day in and day out. I’m only 13, so I can’t drive, I can’t go anywhere. There’s no internet. There’s no smartphone. There’s no computer. There’s no kid down the street I’m hanging out with. I’m just tormenting her daily. And one of my favorite ways to fuck with her was to jump out from hiding spots and scare the ever-loving shit out of her. And I’d just find it the funniest thing in the world to scare her and have her freak out and curse at me.

One time, she gets pissed, has enough and threatens to call my mom. So my grandma sits down, whips out one of those big honkin’ cordless phones with especially big buttons that old people would use and she calls my mom.

She’s going off like “He’s a spoiled brat and he’s this and he’s that. He keeps jumping out and scaring me. All day long, he’s always fucking around.” And I’m pacing in front of her, probably looking guilty and remorseful, thinking to myself oh damn, I really messed up. She’s going off for a full minute straight nonstop but then she looks up, takes one look at me all anxious and starts absolutely bawling. The hardest I’d ever seen. And she says “Nevermind! He can stay, he doesn’t have to go home. He can stay, nevermind!” And hangs up the phone.

I lived with my grandparents, in California, from ages 2 to 12. My grandma was about 70 years old at this time. I didn’t understand her at all. She was all at once one of the meanest, nastiest, sarcastic, smartassed people. She could be kinda racist, cruel, indifferent. But then the simplest moment of empathy or sentimentality would trigger her to become emotional and cry. Her balled up tissue in hand, dabbing at the tears.

My grandma had been ill my whole life up to that point, after having two strokes before I was born. She used a walker, moving gingerly and slowly. And yes, I gave her shit about that too. She was diabetic and my dutiful doting grandpa would give her shots every day. A life of nothing but doctors appointments, TV, insulin shots and pills. And me griefing her every damn day. After her second stroke, I believe in her mid 40s, doctors didn’t believe she’d live long. Well she made it another 35 years or so. Plenty long enough to be in my life through my early teen years.

I was too young to understand the depth of why she was crying then. Why she didn’t want me to return home after toying with the idea for a moment.

Because for all she knew, at 70 years old, how much longer does anyone have? Especially after a lifetime of being sick and in pain. That this trip to spend the summer with my grandparents might be the last time she saw me—the spoiled rotten brat grandchild she had lived with for the past decade.

Now 40, I’ve grown to be a little wiser and I cry now thinking of my grandma, Harriet De Lima. Whom I loved in my own shitty childish way. She showed me that day love always wins and anger passes, and it’s certainly not something that should be held onto. A lesson that took me most of my lifetime to really understand and put into practice. The little shit that I was for so long.

She didn’t live long enough to see me grow up into a man but it would have been nice to know her now. And appreciate and love her in a way that I only became capable of in the last however many years. I am more like her than I’d care to admit. Now I’m the one getting choked up cat, dog and sappy little kid videos on the internet. And every little sentimental song, TV show or movie chokes me up. Maybe I should binge watch Little House on the Prairie one day.

But she showed me people are complicated, flawed, more than a summation of their life’s experiences and more than our memories of them. I only knew her in her old age and who she was is infinitely more than how I remember her. But she taught me that a person’s tough, calloused exterior oftentimes shields a tender, vulnerable interior life.