Namesakes

I fingered the shiny Statue of Liberty model on my mother’s dresser. Her back was to me, as she looked in the mirror, brushing her hair. I had admired the Statue of Liberty before; New York City had always held a certain fascination for me.

This time, she offered it to me and said, softly, that it had been her mother’s. There wasn’t a story behind it, no mystical anecdote about her mother standing in a souvenir shop in New York twenty years ago, watching the rain pouring down outside as she fingered pretty memorabilia and picked a present to bring home. Her mother hadn’t been looking through flea market bargains in the basement of a church when she came across a little trinket that she liked.

It was just a little statue that her mother had owned once, then my own mother had it, and then - it was mine. I thanked my mother, and she was distracted, so she didn’t really notice as I escaped to my room, voice choked and eyes watery. My hands wrapped around the statue, suffocating it.

I hadn’t cried over my loss in years, because with the maturity age had brought me, I had realized it was rather horrible to make my parents comfort me while I sobbed over my grandparents. It had to be awakening their own loss every night I had cried as a child. But surrounded by the pale pink walls of my bedroom, I found my eyes watering and before I realized what was happening, my hand was muffling my cries.

In the other room, my mother brushed her hair.

I was lucky: I had a mother, a father, a brother, and a house filled with pretty things. I was a little girl in elementary school, and the world was my playground. But that didn’t change the fact that my grandparents, all of them, had been dead and buried before I was even born.

From the stories I’d been told, I knew they had been kind and caring. My father’s father had run the family grocery store in the basement of their house; my mother’s father worked multiple jobs supporting his family. My father’s mother had shared my first name, and my mother’s mother - the owner of the Statue of Liberty - shared my middle.

(My mother had always said she would’ve given me her mother’s first name had it not been Vanda. That was apparently just too unusual a name to pass down to me.)

My mother’s mother had loved to bake, and on those nights when I cried myself to sleep, many years ago, my father used to tell me that she was an angel in heaven, and he was certain that she had peanut butter stuck on her wings.

I cried with the Statue of Liberty in my hand for a few minutes before my father walked in my room. He asked me what was wrong, and I stumbled over the answer before he got it out of me. My mother came in my room, and my father sat with her on my bed. My father comforted me over his parents, and my mother comforted me over her parents, and even though they’re my grandparents, I couldn’t help but feel that I had never really had them at all.

Later, my mother apologized for giving the trinket to me; she hadn’t realized it would upset me. I said it was okay, I hadn’t realized it would either, and all the while, I was rubbing the little statue, like in it was a genie that would grant a wish I couldn’t even articulate.

In the years since that moment, I still find myself rubbing the little statue sometimes, and other times, I finger the little ruby and pearl ring that my aunt gave to me for my sixteenth birthday - another piece of my grandmother.

Somewhere, with peanut butter on her wings, I know she watches as my mother and I recreate her various recipes every holiday.

I used to think that all I had of my grandmothers was my first and middle name, but I’ve realized there are bonds between us that have little to do with us ever needing to have met. In my kitchen, we have a recipe box filled with my maternal grandmother’s Sunday night baking projects. On my dresser sits the ring that she grandmother wore once upon a time, and when I move to put it on my finger, I can see the Statue of Liberty watching over me from my window sill.

Those material possessions are nice little pieces of my past, but when I wake up in the morning, and I wander into the kitchen, I have my mother and father eating breakfast, and sometimes I’m struck with the knowledge that even now, years after the passing of my grandparents, my parents are still who they are because of who my grandparents were. Really, it’s like having a little bit of every member of my family tree with me every single day.

Every day, I have the angel wings of my grandparents - complete with the sticky peanut butter on my maternal grandmother’s wings - wrapping around every member of my family, like a child’s security blanket that’s hugged during all the good and bad. (Maybe, just maybe, when I rubbed that little statue with that unexplainable wish, they were watching, and they answered me in the only ways they could.)

I have traditions and a history, and it’s all very pretty and philosophical when I think about it like that, but still sometimes, with my mouth in place to muffle the nonsensical heartache, I still have the faintest wish for a wisp of a memory.