I am terrible about framing photos. I have stacked bundles of photos squirreled away in plastic bags, carry-on luggage, totes. Bricks of empty frames and albums line a closet in my house, waiting for their fulfillment. They are my cobwebbed optimism; my icons of hopeful future craftiness.
One photo, however, is framed in matte gold; a gilded memory: my grandma, laughing, while I smile, pressed close to her, content.
We had just celebrated the occasion of my birthday, along with other beloved family. The women of my mom’s family discipled me to commemorate events by 1) not washing dishes and 2) eating good (not “well,” but “good.” Some errors are just correct). I was about to graduate from college, and I had not been able to spend my previous birthday with family since I had chosen to study abroad, so we got fancy-fancy and ate at a restaurant I always wanted to experience: Windows on the World.
This restaurant was perched atop one of the Twin Towers. Up there, I swore I could view the bend of the earth; the curve of the horizon. We were high, the kind of height that towered over formidable New York skyscrapers, regular day-job obligations, worries. We floated in, a gaggle of first- and second-generation Americans, Jamaican and Bronx accents lilting and filling the fine-dining space, on a cloud of White Diamonds, Jessica McClintock, and expectation. We’re Black so of course I was a bit wary at first. Some of the more tony NYC restaurants sharpen their passive-aggressive snobbery to a deadly point.
Not at Windows on the World. The waitstaff had the patience of Job in answering our menu questions. They zigzagged their gold doodads that one clears crumbs with, with smiles in their eyes instead of stoic duty. Their suggestions were spot-on scrumptious. They treated my grandmother, who used a hearing aid, with all the gentleness due her. Seeing my beloved one cared for well plants a seed of fierce fidelity in me: I will come here again to this safe, fancy place. My people feel good here.
The good humor and genuine excitement for us to experience their place gave us comfort. We continued to float on a cloud of aromatic happy. It was a beautiful meal. Peaceful, in the rare way when no family squabbles get rehashed over appetizers, no one sulked in dissatisfaction, no one felt left out.
We never went back.
My grandmother died just 10 months later, unexpectedly, leaving a crater in my world (still there. Still). I don’t think I have inhaled fully since her death. I half-breathed to keep in tears, fearful of the volume of my full-throated grief. I half-breathed because my grandmother was dead so why should I be fully alive? I half-breathed because of panic stymieing my system. I just got used to breathing this way.
My grandma’s laughter, her selective hearing, her so-soft skin and her Ponds scent were ubiquitous comforts, blanketing every day of my life. Her love was to me as natural as breathing. She helped to raise me since I was three. My grandmother was embodied sanctuary—she kept me from receiving many a whooping. Her prayers scaffolded us in safety.
God, I miss her. I can never hold her again, smiling. She does not know my children; her prayers don’t frame their lives. The ache of missing her, a dull and thick thing, looms viscous over the crater she left.
We never went back because on September 11, 2001, planes were commandeered to fly into the World Trade Center, and the Towers crumbled, cratered into an unnatural ash, twisted-metal mass grave.
I have a framed photo of the Towers, too, but I can’t bring myself to display it. I don’t know if I can make you understand how jarring and terrifying it is to see part of your formative landscape crushed. The place that helped you orient yourself in Lower Manhattan. The place you catch the PATH train. The place with the TKTS kiosk for us locals who wanted to catch a Broadway show. The place your friend works. The place that buys and trades and you *know* is housing some dirty deeds. The place that in its mundane magnificence greets you as you fly back into the city from seminary, welcoming you back home.
I don’t think I can do it: adequately describe half-breathing under the weight of the photo of my late grandmother, laughing in a place that was burned out of existence. Remembering her Ponds-scented love, snatched by a bumbling ICU. Remembering her delicate throat, cut open in a desperate effort to get oxygen into her body. Remembering the violence of death mangling her beautiful face, swelling her lips and cheeks. The hole in her throat. They did not treat her gently. Her body in its last moments, brutalized. Grandma. Grandma. Seeing that photo and remembering the still-smoking remains two weeks after 9/11 when I was finally able to fly back home from seminary; the grief-pocked faces of stunned neighborhood merchants; the wreathed fire stations swathed in black cloth; the intrepid hawkers selling postcards of the smoking towers; the scaffolds and buildings wallpapered with xeroxed photos of the missing.
Do you understand?
I remember.
I remember.
Oh I remember. As a Brooklyn native that day is etched into my memory. There's a photo of my Mom on the Brooklyn Promenade with the towers in the background. It seems like ancient history and also yesterday. This was so beautifully written, thank you for leaving your heart on the page.
I wasn't no more than 4 years old when the towers went down, but every time I read a piece from anything surrounding that time, I'm always touched. Just like how I was touched with this piece. I hope that your days of half-breathing were changed into breathing and feeling alive while doing.
This was beautiful.