Saying Goodbye to My One and Only Grandma Bertha

I have not held up my responsibilities the last week, and for that…I am sorry. Things just got away from me, and my will to chase after and wrangle them was non-existent. I also realize that I may be biting off a little more than I can chew with getting three newsletters out a week while working full-time, where I write about finance/stocks/economy all day. Do you guys ever do that? Rush to make grand plans to make your life so full of art and culture and…LIFE, only to immediately get overwhelmed by all those plans and fall, ironically, into paralysis. I know I do. I do it all the time. Maybe I’ll stew on that and put it into an essay.

That said, for now, I am going to switch to just one free newsletter a week with all the same fixings as before, but a little more mix and match in terms of maybe including poetry and short essays, a whole short story, things that I read/am reading that caught my eye, and always a piece of the essay that will be in the paid Sunday newsletter.

(I made this one free today because I screwed up the last few weeks).

I didn't get last week’s material out because I have fallen into an all-around rut that I haven’t fully gotten myself out of yet. I’m not sure what it is, be it the weather, the mad things going on in the world, or the indifference/holiday-itis that comes when the sun decides to fuck off around 4 pm, and the last thing you want to do is work. I did watch an insane video of how small Earth is and how utterly big the universe is, so maybe it’s that?

It's not that I see this newsletter as work, but the act of creating—dare I say caring—has required more effort lately and has taken a toll. Maybe I’m a bit down, and that’s okay because I have been here before and always seem to get myself out of it.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s get to the work, which is all about my late grandma Bertha, who passed away a few months ago in September. Below are the words I tried my best to speak at her funeral, among family and friends, as she lay peacefully beside me in her final resting place.

I hope she heard them, understood them, and took them wherever she’s headed next.

I love you, Grandma Bertha.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. My grandma Bertha, an extrovert and a lover of all people, would have wanted to be here. She loved us all.

In ways that are mysterious to me even now, I have been preparing for my Grandma Bertha's passing for years. Be it taking the ferry over from San Francisco to see her on weekends in Richmond (a sneaky afternoon beer tucked away in my jacket), knowing in the back of my scattered mind that, one day, I wouldn’t be. Or simply calling her out of the blue on a random day to talk about nothing but whatever she was up to at the time. Oh, Mitchell, she would so often say, Why don’t you come and see me? Which I always replied, I will, I will, I promise. These efforts extended to things like holidays, birthday parties, and when relatives were in town from Mexico or elsewhere, all of us laughing and catching up and simply being with one another. But, in both cases, I have been, to the best of my effort, saying goodbye to her in many different ways, almost as if I had convinced myself my efforts would sway the dreaded day, the dreaded time, the dreaded moment.

So, when I first heard from my sister Kate that Grandma had died, I was ready, to some extent. But, being a writer, I also had a quote to read to myself to soften the blow. Words from greater minds and hearts than mine have always helped me in need. I hope you have them, too, during this difficult time.

After hanging up with Kate and ensuring she was okay, I opened my notes app as my old reality of having grandma in my living life slipped away and read, "What punishments of God are not gifts?

For context, I was in New York on a business trip, visiting a group of people I had never met tucked away in a tiny bathroom stall in a cold, uninviting high-rise. The timing was horrible, but there was no right time to say goodbye to someone you love for good. Stuck in the stall, alone and with nowhere to go but back out into the world with this new, realized pain, this punishment, this unwanted gift, I repeated, "What punishments of God are not gifts?"

I came across this quote, originally from the writer J.R.R Tolkien, in an interview with Stephen Colbert in response to Anderson Cooper asking if he believed those words, to which he answered, "Yes. It's a gift to exist. It's a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There's no escaping that. (And) you have to be grateful for all of it…which leads you to other people's loss, which allows you to connect with that person and understand what it means to be a human being."

Colbert's response is grounded in losing his father, James William Colbert Jr., and two of his brothers, Peter and Paul, dying in a plane crash near Charlotte, North Carolina, when he was just 10 years old. Colbert finishes by saying, "We want to be the most human we can be, and that means acknowledging and being grateful for the things that I wish didn't happen because (in the end) they gave me a gift. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for."

"What punishments of God are not gifts?" I said again, realizing at that moment the hard truth of Grandma Bertha's death was so monumental because the span of her long, beautiful, and, at times, challenging life was so great.

One of my fondest and earliest memories with Grandma Bertha was when the pair of us - maybe Kate was there - would feed ducks in Duck Pond Lagoon Park by the Civic Center. The park overwhelmed the pond like I'm sure Bertha's hand did mine as we often walked the paths together, hand in hand, laughing at the geese and avoiding the squirrels. I remember the sky was always so blue, and the wind blew just right. I was probably dressed in messy overalls, covered in McDonald's ketchup and burger grease.

This time was one of my first memories of peace, of not needing to be anywhere or wanting anything, of presence. It was just the simple act and vision of feeding ducks for no other reason than the sound of the bread on the water, their happy quacks, and our laughter. 

And what's funny was that we always went to the same strip along Duck Pond to feed them, shrouded by pine and willow trees. We could have gone anywhere in the park, but Grandma always took me there. It's remarkable, she probably told me. Could you let me know why it's complicated? Life can be simple if you let it be, mijo.

For all those who know me, I am not just an angel but also a devil, so don't be mistaken; there were some bad memories my grandma and I shared. Like the time she slapped me in the face while stopped at a red light, opening the door to her car to spit. I don't think I cried or got angry, knowing it was well-deserved.

There was the time we lost her precious baya under the house during the 4th of July after Michael and everyone lit fireworks in the backyard, driving wildly around a makeshift mini-motorcycle. Oh, and also the Mexico trip where we visited relatives out in the desert where I used their broken toilet and got in a lot of trouble where later that night Kate slept in a baby carriage…she was probably 10? I also got very sick from eating some rotten marshmallow taffy on that same trip. I was promptly fed Grandma's favorite “get well" remedy: baking soda and water, which resulted in massive, unending waves of puke.

See, boy, she would say. Sickness gone. All better.

Then, there were the later years, the years that led to Bertha's eventual passing, years filled with backyard lunches and dinners, Giants and Warriors on the TV, meals where she wouldn't eat a thing and look at Dad with a sideways glance as if saying, "You expect me to eat that? Es not menudo!"

There were years and years of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Birthday parties with hundreds of relatives who loved her, with nieces and nephews and beers and tequila - all of which she would have a sip or two, instantly wincing - leading her to sing and dance and cry because that's who Bertha was, an epitome of life, joy and sorrow and fear and righteous anger all crystalized into one, four foot something woman who knew first hand how brutal and cruel life could be, yet existed and thrived anyway, in proud rebellion.

I want to end with another quote from director Guerillmo Del Toro and an image. A reporter once commented to Mr. Del Toro, "You really understand and have an extraordinary ability to look into the shadow side, the darker side of human nature and fantasy and terror, but you also are joyful and loving. So, how do you find that balance?"

He replied, "I'm Mexican."

Mr. Del Toro explained, “No one loves life more than we do because we are so conscious about death, the preciousness of life as all of us stand side to side going to the one place we knew we're all going to, death. So we're going to live and have beauty, love, and freedom because when you consider the dark to tell the light, it's reality.”

The image is part of a story I heard about a town called La Luz in New Mexico. Half the farmers from one town would venture out to work in La Luz in the morning. It was dangerous. There were bandits and wolves, so if they didn’t have the energy to return, they would light a great fire to tell their families and friends they were okay, fending off the evils of the night. And from that, the farmers and the town grew, survived, and lived.

That’s who Grandma Bertha was to me and will always be: the light in the dark, the joy in the pain, a most precious gift.

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