The Real LJ Idol - Mini-Season - Week 5
This is my entry for Week 5 of LJ Idol ( 
therealljidol).
Prompt: Void
I would like to preface this by saying everything that I have written here is 100% true, non-fiction. I would also like to sincerely thank you for reading. This is a story I've never told, but it means so much to me and putting it down into text and remembering has been really incredible. The fact that I am able to share this is so special, so again, thank you for taking the time to hear my story and for letting me introduce you to the wonderful woman who was my Mama Helen.
x x x
When I was still but a fetus, tragedy befell my family. My grandfather, whom I would never get to meet, was found dead in his car at the train station. The cause of death was a bullet wound and the gun from which it had come was sitting on the seat next to him. The circumstances surrounding his death were odd and suspicious at the time, and although we’ll never know for sure what happened the probable truth is much clearer now.
My grandfather worked for The Bank. I don’t know which branch or where it was located because everyone I know who has met him and spoken of him only refers to it as such. There was talk that he owed money or had given loans to the wrong people or was in some kind of financial crisis stemming from his position at The Bank, though no concrete evidence to support these rumors ever came to light. All that we do know is that a few weeks before I was born, my grandfather drove his mother to the train station, dropped her off at the platform and then went to fetch her luggage. But, he never returned from the car with her bags.
I know now that it was most likely suicide. My family believed there was foul play. My grandfather was a gentle man of few words who loved nothing more than his family and the thought that he would leave his mother on the train platform, waiting, stranded, is something they couldn’t wrap their heads around. That was almost 30 years ago and in the time since, we’ve come to understand depression and the way it manifests itself much better. We know now that people can suffer silently or choose to take their lives at any moment. We know that it is not always rational or in line with the behavior we may expect from a person. That’s not to say that we can now definitively know what happened, and I’m sure in some weird way it comforts my family to consider the alternatives, but, this is not a story about my grandfather, nor is it meant to be sad. This is a story about love, friendship and one of the greatest women I’ve ever known.
My great-grandmother, Helen, was a heavy set Polish woman with a large bosom and short, curly, white hair. She was feisty, she always said what was on her mind and she loved to cook. She also, unfortunately, endured a lot of tragedy in a very short period of time. They say that deaths come in threes and my grandfather's rounded out that morbid number. Within a year, my Mama Helen had lost her husband, her son and her brother-in-law to untimely deaths. She was smart and strong-willed, but that much heartache would be enough to break even the toughest of customers. I’ve been told she didn’t leave her bedroom for weeks after my grandfather’s funeral services and refused to eat. The void in her heart was just too much to bear. She shut down and gave up.
Until I was born.
I came early, but my mom says that I came at just the right time. My family, especially my great-grandmother, was really struggling, and I somehow must have sensed that I was needed because out I popped, 4lbs 5oz of wrinkled newborn, though I was not expected for almost another four weeks. I was tiny and my skin was yellow and they kept me in an incubator, hooked up to all kinds of wires and nodes, though my doctors were confident that I was healthy and would be completely fine after a few extra days in the hospital. My birth shifted the attention away from grandfather’s death and refocused it onto my life - the first niece, the first grandchild, the first great-grandchild.
We lived in the upstairs apartment of a two-family house that my grandfather and great-grandmother owned together. In the years to come, my dad’s brother and two sisters would all make their first homes here, as my grandfather had intended - a starter house to launch their own families from. During the time that we lived there, however, my great-grandmother occupied the apartment below us.
During the first few months of my life, while I was still mostly just an infant, my mom says that my Mama Helen would come up to visit often, usually barely paying my parents any mind as she made her way to me. She would talk to me or read to me or sometimes say nothing at all and just watch my chest rise and fall as I slept. She loved to hold me and cuddle me and she was constantly shooing my parents out on date nights so that she could have me all to herself. I gave her purpose and a reason to wake up and look forward to every day. Little by little her spark began to return.
It wasn’t until I was a toddler, however, that we really made our bond.
Mom says that even before I’d perfected the art of crawling, I’d learned to slide down the stairs on my belly, feet first, to my great-grandmother’s apartment. I would sit outside her door and yell, not cry or scream or ever get impatient, but just call for her in baby jibberish until she let me in. And I did so daily. We became best friends. I was her pride and joy and she spoiled me with unlimited love, attention and affection. Eventually, we formed a routine.
Every morning, I would make my way downstairs and climb into her lap. Her arms would jiggle as she scooped me up into a suffocating hug, a warm, wide smile stretched across her wrinkled face. We would always do the same puzzle (x) and read the same book (x) and then we’d watch The Price Is Right religiously at eleven. After that she’d make me lunch - usually Rosół (a Polish chicken soup) with butter-slathered white bread on the side - and then send me back upstairs to my parents.
Things went on like this until I was almost five. At that point, my parents were ready to move out of the starter house and into their own home, making room for my aunt and new uncle to take their turn and begin their lives together. My great-grandmother’s sister had been pitching the idea of moving down to Florida for almost a year and although she’d repeatedly refused, the winters were becoming difficult for her and the cost of living was more affordable down south. She sold her share of the two family home to my grandma and then packed up her things. When she left New Jersey, she was whole again and although I'm sure the deaths of her loved ones still weighed heavily on her, she herself was not done living.
I’ve been told more than once that I saved her. Even now, knowing all that I do, it seems like an awfully huge accomplishment to attribute to such a tiny human. In any case, while I only feel like I ever reciprocated the love that she gave to me first, it has always given my life the most incredible sense of purpose. I've never had to struggle with wondering whether or not my life has had any meaning because I know that it has and I am thankful and honored to have been given that task.
It would be a long time before I saw Mama Helen again, though she would call often and regularly send me packages filled with random little gifts and keepsakes. It was often things she probably just had laying around the house - Costume jewelry and figurines and blankets and stuffed animals - things she no longer had use for, but couldn't bring herself to throw away. Most of it was probably junk, but I cherished it all anyway.
I was nine when we took a family trip to Florida to see her. She was old and her health was failing, but she was as stubborn as ever and insisted on spending hours in the kitchen cooking extravagant meals for us and meeting all the new great-grandchildren who had joined the fray in the time since she’d left New Jersey. She had always been rough around the edges, but now it showed in physical ways that I had trouble comprehending. Her hugs were not as tight and smothering as I’d remembered, and her bones poked at me uncomfortably. Her arms still jiggled, but they were not as warm and her skin was sallow and loose. She’d taken on a yellowish tone and the soft flesh beneath her eyes was dark. And yet, she was still beautiful and she was still strong.
During our visit, I remember being so enamored with a shadow box that hung on the wall in her kitchen. It was a cross-section of a three story house, decorated with adorable, miniature dollhouse furniture. She gifted it to me right before we left, well aware of how I'd lingered near it while I watched her cook. It was the last present I received from her, but it was far from the last thing she ever gave me.
Only a few short weeks after our visit, she passed away in her sleep. It makes me happy to know that she went peacefully, in her own home, though I wouldn’t have expected any less. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and refused to take anything less. She was sassy and stubborn and strong-willed right until the very end.
My memories of her funeral are vague. I remember sitting on the big, black couch in my living room after the services not really understanding my feelings or what I was supposed to do with them. My mom told me it was okay to cry, and so I did, but I’m not sure I really even knew why or where the tears were coming from. The unfortunate truth was that most of my memories of Mama were fleeting. I had been so young that despite the heavy presence she'd had in my life, it was hard to recall our time together. However, the bond we shared was there regardless. This woman was extremely special to me, even if my nine year old self was having trouble remembering exactly why.
This is where the story could end. My Mama Helen was an absolute force and I loved her fiercely, as she did me. Telling you that she existed, sharing her life and her strength and her impact would be a fitting tribute. However, in true Mama Helen fashion, she was not yet finished making her mark on my life.
Years later, when I was 16, I was involved in a very serious accident. I’ll tell you now that I’m okay, but at the time, I’d fractured my neck, among other injuries, and the possibility of things being much worse was very real. I was intubated and calling a small, cold, ICU room my home, while surrounded by worried loved ones.
The part of the story that I am about to share is one that was relayed to me by multiple family members who were present at the time. I was on one hell of a drug cocktail and lost about three solid days of my life where I can recall absolutely nothing. My very atheist father, however, swears up and down that this happened and one of my uncles can't even be in the room when we talk about it because he gets so emotional.
As mentioned, I was intubated, which is not only extremely uncomfortable, but also makes it impossible to talk. I couldn’t move my arms or my legs, as my doctors wanted to keep me immobilized until the swelling had gone down and they could assess the damage my neck fracture had or hadn’t caused. To help me communicate, my mom had printed out the alphabet on a sheet of paper and I would spell things by blinking when she pointed to the correct letter. The process was very tedious, though, and I didn’t have much to say anyway, so I didn’t make use of it often. At one point, however, I kept straining my eyes to glance at the empty chair beside my bed, then back at the alphabet sheet until my mom held it up. What transpired next is something that I can’t explain and my family will never forget.
I started my blink-spelling, getting noticeably agitated and impatient with the slow process, but it only took three and a half words for my mom to figure out the phrase. I had spelled out “The Price Is Right.”
“The Price Is Right?” my dad had echoed, confused. “You can’t watch that right now.” But my mom was grabbing at his arm. They’d both lost sense of the time. Staying at my bedside throughout all hours of the day and night had completely thrown them off.
“It’s 10:57," my mom corrected. "The Price Is Right comes on at 11.”
My parents both stared at me, but I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking at the empty chair beside my bed. It’s worth noting that something else I wasn’t looking at, or rather couldn’t be looking at, was the clock. It was hanging above the head of my bed and I was completely immobilized. There is no way that I could've known the time.
“Is Mama Helen there?” my dad asked.
I nodded and my mom held up the alphabet sheet with shaking hands.
M-a-d, I spelled out.
“Mama is mad?”
I nodded and my eyes kept darting to the empty chair.
“Why is she mad?” my dad asked quietly.
I rolled my eyes impatiently and once again started spelling out ‘The Price Is Right.’
“Mama is mad because she wants to watch The Price Is Right?”
I nodded and smiled as best I could around the ribbed blue tube in my mouth.
My parents put on CBS at almost the exact moment The Price Is Right’s theme music had started playing. I watched the entire show and it was the most coherent I’d been in three days. Every once in a while, I’d look to the chair beside my bed.
My parents relayed the story to my family members who were hanging out in the waiting room for support. Some peaked in, some of them cried and some of them laughed. My grandma, however, didn't seem surprised.
“They had a very special bond,” she said. “It makes complete sense that she’d be here for her now.”
I am not a religious person. I know about internal body clocks and the insane amount of drugs and pain killers that were running through my system at the time, but I believe that she was there somehow, when I needed her the most. She watched over me, as I had watched over her so many years ago.
And, so, this is the end of the story; the story about a woman who was my best friend as much as I was hers; a woman who I remember very fondly and think about often. There are so many things that I wish nine year old me would've known to ask. I wish I could've known more about her childhood and about her life in Poland. I wish I could've written down all of her now lost recipes that no one will ever be able to recreate. I wish I could've comprehended how precious our time together was, how much I'm sure she would've had to share. And yet, I know we shared the most important thing of all - love and a bond that was so strong it transcended the physical world. I am so thankful to still have so many keepsakes from our time together. The lion book and the alphabet puzzle are stored in the attic of my parent’s house and the shadow box hangs in my bedroom. One day, I’ll share them with my children, along with this story and hope that they can love and admire Mama Helen as much as I did.
therealljidol).
Prompt: Void
I would like to preface this by saying everything that I have written here is 100% true, non-fiction. I would also like to sincerely thank you for reading. This is a story I've never told, but it means so much to me and putting it down into text and remembering has been really incredible. The fact that I am able to share this is so special, so again, thank you for taking the time to hear my story and for letting me introduce you to the wonderful woman who was my Mama Helen.
x x x
When I was still but a fetus, tragedy befell my family. My grandfather, whom I would never get to meet, was found dead in his car at the train station. The cause of death was a bullet wound and the gun from which it had come was sitting on the seat next to him. The circumstances surrounding his death were odd and suspicious at the time, and although we’ll never know for sure what happened the probable truth is much clearer now.
My grandfather worked for The Bank. I don’t know which branch or where it was located because everyone I know who has met him and spoken of him only refers to it as such. There was talk that he owed money or had given loans to the wrong people or was in some kind of financial crisis stemming from his position at The Bank, though no concrete evidence to support these rumors ever came to light. All that we do know is that a few weeks before I was born, my grandfather drove his mother to the train station, dropped her off at the platform and then went to fetch her luggage. But, he never returned from the car with her bags.
I know now that it was most likely suicide. My family believed there was foul play. My grandfather was a gentle man of few words who loved nothing more than his family and the thought that he would leave his mother on the train platform, waiting, stranded, is something they couldn’t wrap their heads around. That was almost 30 years ago and in the time since, we’ve come to understand depression and the way it manifests itself much better. We know now that people can suffer silently or choose to take their lives at any moment. We know that it is not always rational or in line with the behavior we may expect from a person. That’s not to say that we can now definitively know what happened, and I’m sure in some weird way it comforts my family to consider the alternatives, but, this is not a story about my grandfather, nor is it meant to be sad. This is a story about love, friendship and one of the greatest women I’ve ever known.
My great-grandmother, Helen, was a heavy set Polish woman with a large bosom and short, curly, white hair. She was feisty, she always said what was on her mind and she loved to cook. She also, unfortunately, endured a lot of tragedy in a very short period of time. They say that deaths come in threes and my grandfather's rounded out that morbid number. Within a year, my Mama Helen had lost her husband, her son and her brother-in-law to untimely deaths. She was smart and strong-willed, but that much heartache would be enough to break even the toughest of customers. I’ve been told she didn’t leave her bedroom for weeks after my grandfather’s funeral services and refused to eat. The void in her heart was just too much to bear. She shut down and gave up.
Until I was born.
I came early, but my mom says that I came at just the right time. My family, especially my great-grandmother, was really struggling, and I somehow must have sensed that I was needed because out I popped, 4lbs 5oz of wrinkled newborn, though I was not expected for almost another four weeks. I was tiny and my skin was yellow and they kept me in an incubator, hooked up to all kinds of wires and nodes, though my doctors were confident that I was healthy and would be completely fine after a few extra days in the hospital. My birth shifted the attention away from grandfather’s death and refocused it onto my life - the first niece, the first grandchild, the first great-grandchild.
We lived in the upstairs apartment of a two-family house that my grandfather and great-grandmother owned together. In the years to come, my dad’s brother and two sisters would all make their first homes here, as my grandfather had intended - a starter house to launch their own families from. During the time that we lived there, however, my great-grandmother occupied the apartment below us.
During the first few months of my life, while I was still mostly just an infant, my mom says that my Mama Helen would come up to visit often, usually barely paying my parents any mind as she made her way to me. She would talk to me or read to me or sometimes say nothing at all and just watch my chest rise and fall as I slept. She loved to hold me and cuddle me and she was constantly shooing my parents out on date nights so that she could have me all to herself. I gave her purpose and a reason to wake up and look forward to every day. Little by little her spark began to return.
It wasn’t until I was a toddler, however, that we really made our bond.
Mom says that even before I’d perfected the art of crawling, I’d learned to slide down the stairs on my belly, feet first, to my great-grandmother’s apartment. I would sit outside her door and yell, not cry or scream or ever get impatient, but just call for her in baby jibberish until she let me in. And I did so daily. We became best friends. I was her pride and joy and she spoiled me with unlimited love, attention and affection. Eventually, we formed a routine.
Every morning, I would make my way downstairs and climb into her lap. Her arms would jiggle as she scooped me up into a suffocating hug, a warm, wide smile stretched across her wrinkled face. We would always do the same puzzle (x) and read the same book (x) and then we’d watch The Price Is Right religiously at eleven. After that she’d make me lunch - usually Rosół (a Polish chicken soup) with butter-slathered white bread on the side - and then send me back upstairs to my parents.
Things went on like this until I was almost five. At that point, my parents were ready to move out of the starter house and into their own home, making room for my aunt and new uncle to take their turn and begin their lives together. My great-grandmother’s sister had been pitching the idea of moving down to Florida for almost a year and although she’d repeatedly refused, the winters were becoming difficult for her and the cost of living was more affordable down south. She sold her share of the two family home to my grandma and then packed up her things. When she left New Jersey, she was whole again and although I'm sure the deaths of her loved ones still weighed heavily on her, she herself was not done living.
I’ve been told more than once that I saved her. Even now, knowing all that I do, it seems like an awfully huge accomplishment to attribute to such a tiny human. In any case, while I only feel like I ever reciprocated the love that she gave to me first, it has always given my life the most incredible sense of purpose. I've never had to struggle with wondering whether or not my life has had any meaning because I know that it has and I am thankful and honored to have been given that task.
It would be a long time before I saw Mama Helen again, though she would call often and regularly send me packages filled with random little gifts and keepsakes. It was often things she probably just had laying around the house - Costume jewelry and figurines and blankets and stuffed animals - things she no longer had use for, but couldn't bring herself to throw away. Most of it was probably junk, but I cherished it all anyway.
I was nine when we took a family trip to Florida to see her. She was old and her health was failing, but she was as stubborn as ever and insisted on spending hours in the kitchen cooking extravagant meals for us and meeting all the new great-grandchildren who had joined the fray in the time since she’d left New Jersey. She had always been rough around the edges, but now it showed in physical ways that I had trouble comprehending. Her hugs were not as tight and smothering as I’d remembered, and her bones poked at me uncomfortably. Her arms still jiggled, but they were not as warm and her skin was sallow and loose. She’d taken on a yellowish tone and the soft flesh beneath her eyes was dark. And yet, she was still beautiful and she was still strong.
During our visit, I remember being so enamored with a shadow box that hung on the wall in her kitchen. It was a cross-section of a three story house, decorated with adorable, miniature dollhouse furniture. She gifted it to me right before we left, well aware of how I'd lingered near it while I watched her cook. It was the last present I received from her, but it was far from the last thing she ever gave me.
Only a few short weeks after our visit, she passed away in her sleep. It makes me happy to know that she went peacefully, in her own home, though I wouldn’t have expected any less. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and refused to take anything less. She was sassy and stubborn and strong-willed right until the very end.
My memories of her funeral are vague. I remember sitting on the big, black couch in my living room after the services not really understanding my feelings or what I was supposed to do with them. My mom told me it was okay to cry, and so I did, but I’m not sure I really even knew why or where the tears were coming from. The unfortunate truth was that most of my memories of Mama were fleeting. I had been so young that despite the heavy presence she'd had in my life, it was hard to recall our time together. However, the bond we shared was there regardless. This woman was extremely special to me, even if my nine year old self was having trouble remembering exactly why.
This is where the story could end. My Mama Helen was an absolute force and I loved her fiercely, as she did me. Telling you that she existed, sharing her life and her strength and her impact would be a fitting tribute. However, in true Mama Helen fashion, she was not yet finished making her mark on my life.
Years later, when I was 16, I was involved in a very serious accident. I’ll tell you now that I’m okay, but at the time, I’d fractured my neck, among other injuries, and the possibility of things being much worse was very real. I was intubated and calling a small, cold, ICU room my home, while surrounded by worried loved ones.
The part of the story that I am about to share is one that was relayed to me by multiple family members who were present at the time. I was on one hell of a drug cocktail and lost about three solid days of my life where I can recall absolutely nothing. My very atheist father, however, swears up and down that this happened and one of my uncles can't even be in the room when we talk about it because he gets so emotional.
As mentioned, I was intubated, which is not only extremely uncomfortable, but also makes it impossible to talk. I couldn’t move my arms or my legs, as my doctors wanted to keep me immobilized until the swelling had gone down and they could assess the damage my neck fracture had or hadn’t caused. To help me communicate, my mom had printed out the alphabet on a sheet of paper and I would spell things by blinking when she pointed to the correct letter. The process was very tedious, though, and I didn’t have much to say anyway, so I didn’t make use of it often. At one point, however, I kept straining my eyes to glance at the empty chair beside my bed, then back at the alphabet sheet until my mom held it up. What transpired next is something that I can’t explain and my family will never forget.
I started my blink-spelling, getting noticeably agitated and impatient with the slow process, but it only took three and a half words for my mom to figure out the phrase. I had spelled out “The Price Is Right.”
“The Price Is Right?” my dad had echoed, confused. “You can’t watch that right now.” But my mom was grabbing at his arm. They’d both lost sense of the time. Staying at my bedside throughout all hours of the day and night had completely thrown them off.
“It’s 10:57," my mom corrected. "The Price Is Right comes on at 11.”
My parents both stared at me, but I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking at the empty chair beside my bed. It’s worth noting that something else I wasn’t looking at, or rather couldn’t be looking at, was the clock. It was hanging above the head of my bed and I was completely immobilized. There is no way that I could've known the time.
“Is Mama Helen there?” my dad asked.
I nodded and my mom held up the alphabet sheet with shaking hands.
M-a-d, I spelled out.
“Mama is mad?”
I nodded and my eyes kept darting to the empty chair.
“Why is she mad?” my dad asked quietly.
I rolled my eyes impatiently and once again started spelling out ‘The Price Is Right.’
“Mama is mad because she wants to watch The Price Is Right?”
I nodded and smiled as best I could around the ribbed blue tube in my mouth.
My parents put on CBS at almost the exact moment The Price Is Right’s theme music had started playing. I watched the entire show and it was the most coherent I’d been in three days. Every once in a while, I’d look to the chair beside my bed.
My parents relayed the story to my family members who were hanging out in the waiting room for support. Some peaked in, some of them cried and some of them laughed. My grandma, however, didn't seem surprised.
“They had a very special bond,” she said. “It makes complete sense that she’d be here for her now.”
I am not a religious person. I know about internal body clocks and the insane amount of drugs and pain killers that were running through my system at the time, but I believe that she was there somehow, when I needed her the most. She watched over me, as I had watched over her so many years ago.
And, so, this is the end of the story; the story about a woman who was my best friend as much as I was hers; a woman who I remember very fondly and think about often. There are so many things that I wish nine year old me would've known to ask. I wish I could've known more about her childhood and about her life in Poland. I wish I could've written down all of her now lost recipes that no one will ever be able to recreate. I wish I could've comprehended how precious our time together was, how much I'm sure she would've had to share. And yet, I know we shared the most important thing of all - love and a bond that was so strong it transcended the physical world. I am so thankful to still have so many keepsakes from our time together. The lion book and the alphabet puzzle are stored in the attic of my parent’s house and the shadow box hangs in my bedroom. One day, I’ll share them with my children, along with this story and hope that they can love and admire Mama Helen as much as I did.