My grandfather’s wife Rosa doesn’t want him to spend anything on the gravestone. He defers to her in all strenuous decision-making. She keeps all the money from his pension in her own bank account, to which he doesn’t have access. She accuses family members of trying to take away what is rightfully hers. And he goes along with it, because he believes himself too weak to fight her. He’s had three heart attacks, gone through an angioplasty and most recently, therapy for a stomach tumor. All of which he made it through with aplomb . He’s stronger than he lets on, but by his own admission, he’s passive. My aunt claims Rosa convinced him to re-write his will so that everything goes to her family on his death. The term “parasite” is often interchanged with her name.
Today, it took a 15 minute discussion just to get him to come with my aunt Sola and me to the stone mason’s to order the headstone. He claimed not to feel well enough. I appealed to his decency, reminded him that I had never asked him for a single favor, and that he at least owed his daughter the courtesy of memoralizing her death (even if he didn’t precisely remember her birth, or interest himself in her life.) At last he agreed, after I stressed how important it was to me that he be there.
We drove out to find him and Rosa standing in front of their complex. I got out to help my grandfather into the back seat. Rosa immediately started in with how we were putting him in distress and that we were going to give him another heart attack. I told her straight-up, “You’re the one here causing him stress.”
Sola, already emotional during the drive over, jumped out of the car and started in with such a ruckus I wondered if people would come out of their homes to see what the commotion was. She yelled at Rosa: fine, take him back with you; what do we need him for? I tried my best to calm her down, but it was no use — she was on a roll. I finally got my aunt back in the car, Rosa to her apartment, and onward we went. Yet my aunt was still fuming and couldn’t let it alone. She started again, now on her father. Any word from him was a hook to hang her upsets. She brought up past wrongs and misdeeds: he had been a terrible parent; he didn’t have any time for his family; he let Rosa run his life. Again I cajoled and pleaded with her to compose herself, to wait until a more appropriate place and time. She couldn’t stop. She let it all loose on him. And he just sat there, taking it. I wondered if he tuned it all out.
Just as we arrived at the cemetary’s mason, she ran out of words. It was therapy for her to untangle the pains and frustrations that were twisted up in her psyche.
While she went inside to make arrangements, I sat in the backseat with my grandfather and talked about what I saw at the heart of her anger. How my aunt (and my mother) felt that he was never there for them. How I knew that he was sorry now for his absence; and how he needed in some way, even a symbolic one, to make a settlement. Before it was too late to make any amends.
It’s something I’d now advise everyone.
