i was visiting my mother recently and she was doing what she usually does when i visit – fucking around inside of random cabinets, mindlessly tidying her already tidy home, drinking black coffee the whole time.
it is a gloomy grey afternoon as we share some chocolate over our black coffee and gossip. she just got her nails done and they’re glittery – they look really nice, actually.
she’s busy in the cupboard and she pulls out a small container.
“i forgot this was in here,” she says.
this starts a weird family revelation that i was not expecting as my mother reveals to me that my grandfather, the kind hearted german man i grew up and idolized and wanted to be exactly like, was not my biological grandfather.
she describes that her biological father was a man she never met, a man who left the family destitute to flee to south america to join a mistress there, when my mother was a baby. he left behind three children and my biological grandmother. he also left behind another child fathered with a mistress on the other side of town, an unknown baby girl who would be my mother’s age.
he lived in south america and died under mysterious circumstances.
aside from his body, the only things that came back with him were two 18k gold religious medallions, which my mother hands to me. one is a small sized st. christopher pendant, and the other is a beautiful 18k gold medallion of jesus. on the back of the medallion is an engraving in spanish to my biological grandfather, signed with a spanish woman’s name, dated christmas 1964.
i am fascinated by this. the image of the lord contrasted with the reality of alcoholism, trauma, spousal and child abuse, and also infidelity. innumerable sins butted up against the golden image of a saviour.
my mother sees me studying the piece, “do you want them? you can have them if you want them”
do i want them? of course i want them. i don’t think i’ve so immediately wanted something like this before, except for my grandmother’s gold opal ring (which disappeared under mysterious circumstances). the family secret set into 18k gold with the image of the risen lord bearing the sacred heart.
that’s 100% my shit.
i was wearing my silver pyrrha key necklace, a sterling silver replica of a old skeleton key and i slip the gold medallions on it.
my mother rolls her eyes at me as she tends to when i launch into one of my tirades about sin and redemption and the nature of trauma and our fragile humanity.
i see my mother today and i am wearing the necklace with the golden medallions and the silver key. she rolls her eyes again as she smokes a cigarette.
i wonder what my ukrainian grandfather would think.
“he was a bastard,” my mother says, exhaling cigarette smoke into my face.
i don’t think she’s said that about too many people, so he probably deserved it.
a family secret, a grey day, and 18k gold.
hospital vespers 