Held In the Hands of Tradition

My grandmother is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a saint.

That hint of perfection. Of heaven on earth.

Never mind that she was the most Baptist Southern Baptist you could ever imagine, that’s how I’ll always think of her. Growing up, we were woven together in ways that came as naturally to me as breathing. I never questioned her significance in my life, much less analyzed it; she just was. Many afternoons were spent riding my bike the few blocks from our house to hers, playing in the mud in her backyard, then crashing on her couch, dozing off as I listened to her tell and retell stories from “Depression Time,” her years teaching in public schools, of running church programs. As a child, I can remember many nights sleeping over at that house, sharing her bed as she Bible-storied me (and usually herself) to sleep. Sometimes, she started snoring in the middle of Joseph and his brothers or Moses and the bush; I usually gave her a little rest before nudging her awake to finish, staring up at the popcorn ceiling and listening to the crickets outside. In summers, I tagged along with her to the church near downtown Tulsa where she worked, sitting in her office and wandering around the halls. The threads between us were strong and unquestioned.

As I grew older and saw that death was coming for her soon, I knew but didn’t know that she was really going to leave us. In the last months, when she was faintly falling, it simply didn’t compute.

There’s a lot more to say about the pain and the guilt over giving up her religious tradition after all she’d done for me. At least in the last year or two she was alive, Ma and I could usually bond over our shared passion for writing, for books. I could always change the subject to that when she wanted to ask whether I’d found a “church home” of my own or if I still read my Bible every day. She stored up a stack of books for me about writing that she’d consulted over the years. She offered to read along with me as I worked my way through graduate school. It was only a few years after her death, when I was preparing to become a mother myself, that I finally felt able to return to the Church in the way that was intended for me. Catholicism had always made sense on some intuitive level to my way of being in the world, but I’d never conceived of that community as a possibility in the wake of all that Ma had taught me for all my life. The first few months I attended Mass regularly were filled with anxiety, more guilt, and pain as the truth of who I was called to be sharpened into focus ever more clearly in contrast with the woman Ma had always wanted me to be. In a sense, it felt like I was losing her all over again, a grief only magnified by the reality that she would never get to hold this great-grandson taking shape inside me.

Ma’s hands

Like many experiences of grief, I still don’t quite know how to articulate the loneliness I felt as I sat in our newly chosen parish church, the symbols eerily familiar and suddenly foreign. I often found myself reviving memories of weeks going to church with Ma, sitting next to her in the pew as she guided me along in her Bible or the hymnal. I used to take a lot of pictures of her hands, so I still have a clear image of what that looked like—a relic of another time, when God was both closer and larger, more comforting and frightening than I may ever know again. Now, sitting in Mass, I struggled to reconcile those moments with this strange new world of liturgy and kneelers. On the rare occasion that they chose to sing “Amazing Grace” or some other Protestant hymn, I was surprised to realize I still knew them by heart, which felt both like a consolation and a crime.

The week that my son was born, my parents drove up from Oklahoma to Chicago. They arrived the day before what would have been Ma’s 100th birthday; my mom and I were convinced the baby would choose that day to be born, but it wasn’t meant to be. That week, Mom and Dad shared stories of when my older brother and I were babies, what it was like to become parents. At one point, my mom said semi-casually, in this way that she has, how overwhelmed she was when I was born, how hard it was to remember some things. When I asked who took care of me, she simply said, “Mother.” Ma. At the time, I found that thought touching but moved on, preoccupied with the subtle fear that I was not equipped for whatever lay ahead. Every twinge was dripping with suspense as we waited for my son to arrive. When he finally decided he was ready (promptly waking me up with my water breaking on the morning of his due date), everything went smoothly and swiftly. My labor lasted three and a half hours, and I was up and around again pretty quickly; my dad made some remark about how those Tabb women (my mother’s side of the family) were born to give birth. I was in love and raging with hormones and exhaustion. My parents had to leave the morning after we came home from the hospital, and my husband and I were on our own with our baby, a new family.

It was pure bliss and pure terror—sometimes alternately, sometimes simultaneously. Like for many new parents, so much about those early weeks is now a blur.

But one of the few things I remember clearly is one black-blue late night staying up with my son in my arms, before he would let us put him down to sleep. I sat in an armchair in the corner of our living room, feeling simultaneously full of love for this little person and unbearably alone. Then, two things happened: I looked out the window and noticed the light starting to come in, much like how I remember watching the light change from Ma’s bed those summer mornings; and I looked on the other side of me to find my favorite picture of her sitting on a shelf. She was staring down at me, beaming with pride as she had when I’d taken the photo, her cheek resting on her hands as she paused her story simply to radiate love. And I remembered what my mom had said, how Ma was the one who was there from the beginning. In the beginning. Filling me with life. With my free hand, I picked up my baby album from the coffee table that used to be hers, now resting in the center of my living room. I’d glanced at the album in the days leading up to my son’s birth, but I hadn’t really looked. Picture after picture showed Ma holding me, often just out of frame, only her hands in focus.

And I felt a great communion. World without end.