I Can’t Believe I Came From Her

My grandmother died. These words rattle around my heart like pinballs that won’t settle, even a week beyond her funeral. And yet I wonder if the settling of these pinballs would be any better — the finality of their lodging into the belly of that machine, no longer kept alive by another flap of the paddles.

Mayme Alice was the last of my grandparents to leave this earth, and undoubtedly the one with whom I grew closest. When I was a boy she tossed me wiffle balls and even took pitches from me, too, holding that yellow plastic bat one-handed and mightily swinging away. One day in college she left me an excited voicemail while our beloved Phillies scored nine — “wait, now ten!” — runs in the first inning, all with no outs, and she wrote me a letter in gigantic handwriting after the Phils finally won the World Series in 2008: baseball’s promised land for twenty- and seventy-somethings alike.

She wrote me after my dog died in college and said she felt really sad with me, too. We exchanged many emails and letters from my adolescence into adulthood, and I always picked up a postcard for her in all my travels — from Maine to Yosemite, Vancouver to Puerto Rico.

I never dreamed of the day I’d be handed back all those postcards in a zip-locked bag because my grandmother wasn’t around to hold onto them anymore.

I’m devastated. These waves of sorrow crest and fall and never quite level out. Beyond other sorrows I’ve suffered, this one is more difficult to put into words; this blog, a feeble eulogy for the greatest person I’ve ever known. Someone I can hardly believe I was related with.

Beyond the devastation I do also feel extraordinarily lucky. Blessed even to have known my grandma when many kids grow up without one, or have one that’s cynical and crotchety — one I knew all the way into my mid-thirties, sharing many visits and adventures. We climbed the Statue of Liberty together. We walked the streets of Philadelphia. She took me to Delaware for a live show of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (Because Tom’s childhood.)

My grandmother watched me and my siblings on a weekly basis, our homes on opposite ends of Maple Avenue for most my childhood. Moving from Pennsylvania to Georgia as a 12-year-old was brutal on me in many ways, but by far the most brutal being separated from my Mayme.

I can still see her climbing my attic bedroom steps the night I found out about the impending move. There to console me and tell me everything would be okay. She made silly faces in her driveway as we pulled away with our loaded minivan, my face trenched in tears. I called her from a hotel room on that long drive south, comforted if only for a few minutes by her always reassuring voice on the other end.

Did her voice have any other tone?

She surprised us with a visit hardly a few days after that move. I’ll never forget her wide-eyed face at the bottom of the staircase as I emerged from my new bedroom, still grief-stricken by it all. I raced down the stairs. Couldn’t believe she was actually here.

I looked forward to visits back home to Pennsylvania every Christmas. Enjoyed seeing all my family again, of course. But also to see Mayme.

~ ~ ~

I never want to take for granted that I grew up with amazing grandparents, including a grandmother who was the most selfless person I ever knew. Always tending to others’ needs, making sure I had a meal ready when I visited her, along with two sandwiches packed for my flight or drive back home.

She’d often peer through the back window with a mischievous grin as I stepped up the stairs with my suitcase upon arrival. She’d heat up the leftover dinner set aside for me from hours ago and sit with me while I ate, catching up on all the time we’d missed.

As I gained more freedom over my schedule in recent years, I could turn five-day visits into two-week ones, though I always hated leaving down her gravel driveway. Echoes of our packed minivan pulling away, ending an era of my childhood. The sound of those kicked up stones like little daggers of goodbye.

But even when we were apart, we could connect. We wrote.

~ ~ ~

It was early 2013, and I was putting the finishing touches on my first book — the one in which, among other things, I’d reveal my sexuality to the world. A massive coming out years in the making. In the months leading up to my book’s release date, I made it a point to initiate one-on-one conversations with all the vital people in my life who needed to know this little detail about myself before reading about it in a book.

I called various friends, messaged others, and shared with my church group in California at the time. Everyone I told supported me, and I felt more and more weight falling off me as release day neared.

But two people still sat atop my coming out list as this book would soon start coming out for me on my behalf.

Just three weeks before my book release, my grandfather had a stroke. He was never the same after that, his thoughts and words all jumbled, his mobility severely limited. To have a conversation with him now about his grandson’s sexuality, of all the random and complicating subjects, felt futile.

But what about my grandmother?

Anyone who has experienced the harrowing experience of coming out to another human knows this plight all too well: what do you do when the timing gets thrown off? Someone is no longer available at a previously agreed upon time or place, or now another person is joining us for lunch, or they just had an awful day and want a carefree evening watching Netflix.

Do you just rip off the conversation anyway like a bandage, or do you wait for another time or place that better matches the idealized layout in your head?

Or is there even a good time or place to come out to your grandmother?

~ ~ ~

“How many pages does a chapter have?” I asked Mayme at seven years old, pencil and paper in hand.

“Well it can have as many as you’d like!” she responded. I nodded with all the reassurance a seven-year-old budding author needed. You see, a couple decades before Struggle Central I wrote my first first book, a fictional short story masterpiece called Invisible Jonny (don’t ask me what happened to the h). I even did my own rudimentary artwork for the book, complete with twenty or thirty chapters that were, in fact, a third of a page in length each.

I wrote a couple other mystery books as a kid that my dad photocopied and stapled together, and Mayme Alice was always my biggest fan. “When are you gonna write another book?” she’d ask me. She got her Master’s in English Literature (at 62, no less). Her support for my writing, going all the way back to Invisible Jonny, felt special.

When I discovered I wanted to write “actual” books in college, I couldn’t wait to write my first acknowledgements section — to go through the whole maddening process of drafting and then editing and reediting and then to take a deep breath at the end just to thank all the people who helped make this book happen. Four years after college, I pieced together Struggle Central, and those acknowledgments were indeed my last exhale before hitting the proverbial red publish button.

I thanked my grandparents in the opening paragraphs:

To my grandparents, Mayme and Ahh: you two paint such a vivid picture of love, both for each other and for other people. I can confidently say I would not be the man I am today without your ongoing presence throughout my life. I love you both.

Release day came and went, and I’d thanked them in the acknowledgements, but how I’d wanted to acknowledge them long beforehand. How I’d wanted to share this sacred piece of myself with my grandparents, but the time and place just never matched up. Maybe if I’d lived closer, or if we’d never moved, or if Ahh had never had his stroke — I don’t know.

I got such supportive feedback of my book in the days following. I couldn’t keep up with all the emails and texts for a whole week. But I’ll never forget the review that mattered most:

“Tom, it’s a wonderful book.”

Mayme told me so over the phone one day, and the sweetness of her tone blankets my memory like the taste of her cinnamon boiled apples on my tongue. My grandmother, someone who was perpetually reading a new book as long as I was alive, had approved of my first book, called it wonderful, and I couldn’t have been more elated.

Still. I felt the need for a more focused conversation, some better closure to address the elephant in the pages. And when I thought about all the different ways I’d come out to everyone else over the last few months and years, I thought it only fitting I come out to my grandmother via one of our love languages: handwritten letter. Even though she already knew. Even though she’d already affirmed me. I just needed to tell her, finally, one-on-one, to honor her as I’d honored all the other precious people in my life.

And so I wrote my grandmother a coming out letter saying I’d wanted to confide with her and my grandfather, but that I just didn’t know how to go about it. That I hoped this would clear things up now. That I loved her so much.

I licked a quivering tongue to the envelope seal and sent it away, anxious for her response. Even though I already knew. Of course I did.

~ ~ ~

During the height of the pandemic (along with my first treatments for an autoimmune disease) I didn’t get to see my grandmother for Christmas 2020 — the first Christmas of my life I’d missed being at her house. I determined to return in 2021. In fact, I made it a point to visit Pennsylvania three times last year. I wanted to make up for lost time, and I wanted to see my grandmother as much as I could for whatever time I had left.

I truly had no idea this past Christmas would be the last time I’d ever see her. I always thought of her as our family’s Betty White, treasured and sweet and still so sharp and full of life at 93. She could easily make it to 100, I thought. I thought the same of Betty.

The shock of it all still disorients me. She had five to ten more years. I was gonna call her the day before she died, had thought the thought. But for some reason I didn’t. Regret winces my side like a bee sting that won’t heal, though I couldn’t have known. Don’t we all want that “one more” phone call, or visit, or hug?

I am glad I took those three trips to visit her last year. Glad we got to play Scrabble (or “Scrapple,” as she affectionately called it) one last time.

If I live to an average age, I will have spent more years on this planet without Mayme Alice than with her, and it’s a haunting thought. I’m flying to Seattle next month for a weeklong adventure, and I will inevitably be reminded by some shop’s spinning postcard tower that I can never again pick one up for my Mayme.

How can I watch Jeopardy! without thinking of her? How can I enjoy a Columbo mystery without her sitting beside me? How can I ever line up the tiles for another game of “Scrapple” without a sweet sadness thundering in my chest?

If indeed I remain single and never produce offspring, as I feel my story more and more led to go, I lament not being able to bring any of Mayme Alice into the world, if even a tenth of a percent of her, though I know she lives on in so many others, including my niece who bears and shares her most lovely middle name.

“She lives on in you, too,” I hear some of you saying. It’s a sentiment I appreciate and do need to hear, but one I often struggle to believe. I came from her? Her, the most gracious selfless human, and me among the most self-seeking?

None of you see my journal entries. None of you witness my therapy sessions. When I compare my caverns to my grandmother’s light, I almost feel unrelated.

And now I feel like a ghost in this new world without Mayme Alice, an exponential disorientation of my walking in a world without Ahh.

Everything feels upside down and hollowed out. Nothing as it should be.

Thirty-four years of the present is truly past now. A gravestone in Langhorne says it plainly. 2022 marks the end of an era: the end of one life well-lived as well as dozens others of us who must learn this terrain of living anew. Living without.

~ ~ ~

I could go on and on about all the things Mayme Alice did and all the things Mayme Alice said. Her legacy reaches to nine children, ten grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren (and counting).

She did crossword puzzles with me over the phone. I helped her with geography and answers that millennials would know.

I asked her to draw me maps as a kid for some reason, and she did, spurring my love for geography and eventually travel. In eighth grade she helped me papier mâché some mountains for a diorama of the California gold rush — the same mountains I would one day call home in my mid-twenties, the very mountains from which I would write her a coming out letter and wait for her to write back.

She hosted me and one of my high school friends for two weeks and often asked about said friend in the years following. She genuinely cared. She was delighted I’d gained readers — friends — there in Pennsylvania through the wonders of the Internet.

“Does anybody else do what you do?” she asked me on my last visit. It was one of the last conversations I ever had with her. She had asked about Your Other Brothers, my blog, my podcast, my efforts to reach a searching world through the medium of story that they are not alone in their struggles with faith and sexuality, masculinity and community.

She thought this work I do was wonderful. Just like my book from all those years ago.

While I do struggle with selfishness, I suppose I can spot her this one. Maybe the one percent of myself that isn’t selfish and wants fellow strugglers to feel the bliss of sharing burdens indeed comes from her. Validates my Zuniga heritage after all.

~ ~ ~

On her coffin I laid a yellow rose, her favorite flower, and told her I’d see her again soon. God, I hope it’s soon.

Despite the heaviness, I felt a genuine joy to be with the rest of my family again, all of us unified with stories and laughter and, yes, shared tears. We gathered in my grandmother’s now former house, eerily no longer occupied by the two people who had brought us all there, formed most of us into existence.

To celebrate Mayme’s life, we gathered on her porch and sang one of her favorite songs, if not her very favorite — “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver. One of her nine children led the charge on guitar, and it’s among the most spiritual moments of my life, some forty of us singing in unison and in honor of this woman we loved and adored, about a place where we belong.

How fiercely we long for life’s road to lead us all home one day. To reunite us on the other side and rescind these tears that, for now, cannot stop falling.

What a thing for forty people to sing on a porch together because once upon a time two people fell in love. Theirs is a story for another blog, or a book, or perhaps a feature film.

I never saw my grandmother cry at her husband’s funeral. They were married 71 years, and I never saw her cry once my whole life. Not that it’s some admirable thing never to cry — but I truly wonder if her hope was so strong there was no need to shed a tear, even through her husband’s stroke and the six arduous years of caretaking and collapse that followed.

Country roads took him home, and three years later they took her home, too.

~ ~ ~

I checked my California mailbox that spring of 2013, delighted and yet also slightly terrified to receive a letter back from my grandmother. I opened it with trembling hands and read her trademark flowing cursive (“Will school kids today even learn or be able to read cursive anymore?” she often lamented with me):

Dear Tom,

How surprised and pleased I was to receive your letter. Your stationery is much nicer than mine, though if I don’t have lines, I write uphill.

Let me say this: it’s a wonderful book and you have such great courage to bare your soul the way you did.

I understand how you felt about confiding in Ahh and me. But now you have and that took courage too . . . you always will be high up there in my estimation. Ahh and I love you so much too.

My grandmother reassured me with her words, as she was always so adept at doing, going all the way back to those attic bedroom stairs. She went on to say she admired my conviction to walk out my sexuality the way I was walking, along with some other powerful things I needed to hear upon rereading that letter recently. Things I’ll keep to myself for now.

She closed her response to my coming out letter in the way only Mayme Alice could, reaffirming that this revelation changed nothing about our special bond, only made it stronger — naturally segueing to the topic of our dear Phillies in a lackluster 2013 season:

And those Phillies are stinkers. Sometimes I think Chase Utley is the only one who really cares.

Love you to pieces.

— Mayme

My grandmother indeed loved me to pieces. Even the dark scary sharp and fractured ones that often make me feel unloveable.

I still struggle with selfishness. Still struggle to see — and put — others’ needs before my own.

But I do believe I came from Mayme Alice. I believe it in my love for books and story. I believe it in the work I do. I believe it in our written words, and I believe it in all the hugs and Scrapple matches we shared.

“I’m gonna beat Tom the next time he comes to visit,” she recently told my aunt during a game of their own.

What I wouldn’t give to lose to her right now.