How a solo road trip 14 years after my grandmother's death taught me forgiveness and letting go.
My grandmother died on January 16, 1988—37 years ago now. I was 14 years old, midway through my freshman year of high school. Though she left before I could keep the promise I’d made to visit her every single weekend once I got my license, I carry her with me always. My daughter is named after her. I’m raising my family in Lowell. And I still think of her any time I smell Jean Nate perfume.
To celebrate her memory, I’m sharing newly edited excerpts I wrote about her in my memoir, Finding My Way Home.
What I remember about those visits to Lowell was that Grammy always wore a light cotton house dress, usually blue or white with floral prints, and stockings that rolled at her knees. With her missing teeth and white hair, she looked like the archetypal Grandma character from a storybook, but she was so much more. She was my mother’s mom. Her cheeks lifted and her mouth opened wide when she laughed. She seemed genuinely happy when we were there.
At 13, I happily crawled into my mom’s pickup truck, between my mom and Grammy, and we’d head to the grocery store. I loved these visits. I always promised my grandmother that when I was old enough to drive, I would visit her by myself. I’d take her shopping, just the two of us.
But she died in the middle of my freshman year, and I never got the chance.
Fourteen years later, I was living on my own, had no significant other, no children, and no responsibility to anyone other than myself. Still, I needed to run far, far away. What I was running from, I wasn’t quite sure. Perhaps it was reality, perhaps it was memory. Perhaps it was myself. Maybe it was a bit of all three. I was driving across the country alone in my white VW Cabrio convertible, traveling from Massachusetts to California. I was 28 years old and running away—from what exactly, I couldn’t quite articulate. From my family. From expectations. From myself, maybe. More than two weeks into my trip, I stopped for a day at Arches National Park and stayed the night in Moab, Utah.
The center of one of the stone arches was shaped like an eye, so I climbed up to see through to the other side. It was like looking into a house of mirrors where an image was reflected again and again, endlessly repeating. So many arches of varying shapes sprouted atop other rocks, all gateways to either the ancient or the divine. The sky was a subtle, pale blue with scattered white streams that were more like gentle strokes of a paintbrush than clouds.
That gentility soothed me. It was the first day I had not felt the burden of time rushing me along. Routinely, I have a loud, ticking clock in my head. As my fear of being late for anything intensifies, the tic-toc-tic-toc beats accelerate and my heart races. I inherited this anxiety from my mother. But there, that day at Arches, there was no ticking clock—only the huge, vast sky.
I felt close to heaven there. Alone with the sun and sky and rocks, I spoke to the spirit of my grandmother, Lillian.
“I don’t know why I get so angry at them,” I said out loud. “It’s so hard to be around them.”
I paused, thinking about my parents.
“I wish that my mom could be here with me. She’d love this. So would my dad. I wish their lives had been easier, that they could have taken their family on more vacations, had more happy memories.”
A mother of eight, Lillian worked in the Lowell mills and was married to a traveling salesman. They never owned their own home. She never drove a day in her life. She toiled, cooked, and cleaned every day until her death.
“Were you happy, Grammy?”
A cousin who’s 11 years my senior used to tell me Grammy was a miserable, mean old lady who yelled a lot. That sounded like a description of my own mother, minus the old part. It seemed to me that my grandmother had the right to be miserable. Laboring away in the hot, crowded mills only to return home and prepare dinner for a family of 10, then dying with nothing to her name—felt desperately sad.
Then I realized: my mother lived such a similar life, yet I never forgave her the stresses that drove her to scream.
Sitting there beneath that stone arch, I understood something I’d been too young and too self-centered to see when I was younger. The lives of my mother and grandmother were so dissimilar to mine in ways that made me feel both blessed and spoiled. I needed to escape? I was responsible to no one but myself. The greatest stresses in my life were pulled hamstrings and bad breakups, yet I wanted to run away. I was disappointed with my family.
But what right did I have to judge them? What did I know about the weight my grandmother carried, working those brutal mill shifts and then coming home to eight children? What did I understand about my mother’s exhaustion, her anxiety, her own inherited burdens?
I couldn’t stop thinking about getting back home
We spend our childhoods trying to understand ourselves through our parents—seeing ourselves reflected in their eyes, measuring ourselves against their expectations, either becoming them or rebelling against them. But somewhere along the way, if we’re lucky, we start to understand our parents through ourselves. We see them not as the mythic figures of our youth—all-powerful, all-knowing, all-disappointing—but as people. Just people, doing the best they could with what they had.
My grandmother never got to take those trips with me or anyone. She never got to sit in the passenger seat while I drove her to the supermarket, finally old enough to keep my promise. But maybe, in a way, she was with me at Arches that day. Maybe she helped me see what I needed to see.
It’s so easy to get caught up in our day-to-day emotions, to get angry and take it out on the people we love. But we are all just humans experiencing this life for the first time. My grandmother was. My mother is. I am too.
That realization—that we’re all just figuring it out as we go—changed something in me that day. A big part of what would change my life was returning to my family and reconciling with them. Not because they were perfect, or because I was, but because letting go feels so much better than holding on to anger.