We kissed her cheeks, and told her again and again how much she was loved.
My grandma was dying the first time I read her my writing. She was dying but looked fabulous. My cousin arranged a service so she wouldn’t die without her nails done. That would be a tragedy. She wore her pink lipstick too, for a while. She gossiped with the nurses, and relished being their favourite. The most fun patient, the only one in hospice barely dying. My grandma was Gram to me, and Gigi, for “Great Grandma”, to my boys.
She was so proud of me, even though she had never read a word of my writing. Even though I hadn’t been signed by a literary agent. There was no book deal then, no bylines or even a published short story. Just a pile of rejections and a hope that one day it would be different. She followed me on Instagram, in her 80s but never to be left behind.
But it couldn’t be true, she couldn’t have gone before all this. She had to see my agent sign me, the book deal that followed, the UK deal and the 19 translations to come, the film agents pitching it to Hollywood – oh, how the hospice nurses would have loved all that. When foreign deals began to roll in she would have asked,she was a first generation Italian-American. Not that she even spoke it. She wasn’t taught by her parents; they wanted her to assimilate.
I read her some pages during those hospice days when it was still a printed Word document, sections about the beach we both loved, the place that was ours. The beach that inspired the book. And I told her I named the beachher middle name was Bernadette and my grandfather’s was Bernard; a funny coincidence. Because my love of the beach was theirs, and my love of love was because they showed me how., and it autocorrected, and because it was a beach town, it stuck.
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