“Stop, Mom,” Kasia says. “Let’s talk about something nice. We’ll go cross-country skiing. You’ll like it.” I stop speaking about my plans because I see my grim preparation is hurting them. But I continue silently.
Mirek cannot stay alone. How difficult would it be for him in our house, with everything the same but without me there anymore? How would I feel if he were gone? How lonely to come back to a darkened house—my clothes still there, my earrings, my life as I had left it. But no me.
I feel so sorry for him that my eyes well up with tears. I’m afraid they will see me crying. I have to shake it off and stop thinking such thoughts. But Kasia knows. “Mom, it’ll be all right,” she says tenderly. “Mirek will be fine. We’ll all be fine. Don’t worry.” But of course I worry. I worry for them, and for myself.
We all stop for the night at Kasia and Jake’s house in New Haven. Our grandsons, Lucian and Sebastian, greet Mirek and me with shrieks of joy. They don’t fully understand what’s happening but they know that Babcia (Polish for “grandmother”) is sick and everyone is worried.
This house is freighted with meaning and memories. When Mirek, Kasia, Witek, and I first moved to America in 1989, we lived in a rental apartment in a subdivision of townhouses in Alexandria, Virginia, among a sea of immigrants from around the world. We were delighted by the size of our apartment. With bedrooms for each child, it was the largest place we’d ever lived and seemed like a mansion. We owned no furniture, so a work colleague loaned me a queen-size air mattress that Mirek and I shared, and the children slept on large pieces of foam we bought at a garage sale for a dollar each. At a church sale, we paid thirty-five dollars for a chrome-plated table and beaten-up chairs with plastic yellow cushions that felt luxurious after weeks of sitting on the floor and using a cardboard box for our table.
It was Kasia who first mentioned that the only kids who got off the school bus at the housing complex were recent immigrants. Other kids—she meant richer kids—lived in single-family homes in nice neighborhoods. We researched what it took to buy a house and found that a mortgage would cost about the same as our rent. And the money would go into our own property! It was a revelation. The concept of owning a house was thrilling and totally foreign. We began looking for something that we could afford, and in the real estate section of the Washington Post, we found a house in Annandale, Virginia, in a neighborhood very close to the one we were in, with large Colonial single-family houses and meticulously kept yards. The property we bought stood out as long neglected, with spots of bare earth and huge tree roots cutting through the front yard, and the house needed a lot of work. But it backed onto woods and a stream. Most important, it was our land, all the way to the center of the earth. We loved the sense of freedom and independence that it offered. It told us that we had made it in America.
Both Kasia and Witek now have beautiful three-story homes of their own. Witek and Cheyenne live in a bohemian district of Pittsburgh, and Kasia and Jake’s home is a sky-blue Victorian on a quiet street a mile from the Yale campus. Every time we visit them, the sight of all they have accomplished makes my heart swell with pride and love, as do Kasia and Jake’s adorable children, my grandsons, Lucian and Sebastian.
Everything about these boys makes me deliriously happy. The smell of their hair and skin is intoxicating, overpowering. I love their smiling faces, their funny, uneven, oversize teeth, their messed-up, sweaty hair, the energy bubbling in their little bodies. There’s nothing I love more than visiting them and playing their games with them, reading to them, walking them to school. I try to cherish every moment of their childhoods—a time in their lives that will, of course, pass too quickly.
Where does it come from, this overpowering love of a grandmother for her grandchildren? Forty years ago, when Kasia was born, my mother-in-law laughed and wept and doted on her first grandchild, clapping with joy and excitement at every minute change of expression on the baby’s face, every movement of her tiny hands or feet. I was embarrassed for her. Then Kasia’s son Sebastian was born, in 2006, and I quite similarly became a doting grandma. When Lucian was born three years later, it happened again; I felt the extraordinary emotions triggered by becoming a grandmother. Just as my own babcia adored me and showered me with unconditional love, I discovered that a grandma’s love is boundless, stupefying, sentimental, and capable of turning one’s brain into schmaltzy mush. It’s also superbly gratifying and blissful. And I have never felt more desperate for these two small, precious boys than I do now.
We all take Sebastian and Lucian to school the next morning, a Monday. It hits me that I may never see them again, and a wave of maddening sorrow rises inside my chest, floods my body, and chokes my throat. I kiss their heads, smell their hair, hug their thin, little bodies, and leave.
Mirek, Kasia, Cheyenne, Witek, and I continue north, leaving Jake behind to care for the boys. He will join us later. It’s snowing again as we pass through the stark, binary landscape: white roads, white fields sliced with black rivers, black tree trunks with branches like pencil strokes on white paper. A frozen world.
I feel I am frozen too, as fragile as a thin sheet of ice. A tap in the wrong spot and I could shatter.
We arrive in Boston before noon.
