Lovely Penguin

by marie gordon

My mother always told me life wouldn’t always be easy, but that, I could always count on my family to be there for me. She told me I could always count on them, on my own integrity, and, on God…

I remember when I was there. I looked at her so peaceful. She was 85. She didn’t look very old to me. She looked contented with her arms by her sides, her tiny cross hanging from her neck on that gold chain. The flowers engulfed her as if she lay in a field, as if she slept on this silk pillow so quietly, just for the afternoon. I knew who she was, but my grandmother never touched my life like she did that one day.

My mother told me to touch her. “You may touch her. Hold her hand,” she told me. I wasn’t scared. Grandmother was a pillar, although so delicate, her faith on a bed of flowers. Her hands felt so smooth, so soft, like silky coolness. I remember the feeling of holding her hand in mine, my tiny hand. Her grace never left and I wanted to hold on. She captured me in her peace and I wanted to stay there. Instead, I followed my mother’s lead, knelt down before grandmother on the altar, and said a prayer for her soul in heaven.

That night I was given my grandmother’s Bible, her glow-in-the-dark cross. I held my blanket tightly, the one she had given me. The silky side of the blanket I slept on in the summer and spring and the cotton side in the fall and winter. But tonight I could not find that warm cotton side. I held my blanket in my hands like I held my grandmother’s hand that that day and I pictured her stitching the tiny figures of bunnies and flowers into the fabric. She never lost her beauty.

Grandmother did not speak much to me. I did not know her like I knew her until that day and until I first opened her Bible, to find it marked by the page marker on my favorite psalm, Psalm 23. I read it aloud and I began to wonder what my grandmother was feeling those last few days of her life. If she was in pain, we never knew. Everyone said she died quietly in her sleep. But I wondered. If anyone in my family has strength, Grandma Hyatt had a reputation for it. She’d been through Hell, so I’d been told. I’m not really sure what exactly. Certain secrets were always implied by a tone in my family, one marked by certain secrecy. For what she had gone through, Grandmother’s faith was amazing. She went to mass daily. She knew the old Latin masses. She came to my birth and baptism in her old age.

For Grandma Hyatt, having a Christian family wasn’t just a way of life, it was her whole life. When I look at my Bible, at that passage, I know Grandma Hyatt must have gone through more than what she ever told us. But I wouldn’t have known that seeing her at her funeral. For a woman of 85, she looked as if she’d slept on beds of roses her entire life. Maybe her body was old, but her soul never grew old. When I think about that, I do not feel so withered by my past. Despite what she’d been through those 85 years, she left too peacefully to ignore.

I didn’t know how or why Grandma left me that Bible. Maybe she felt what I felt long before that day I held her hand. Maybe she didn’t know who else to give these things to besides her oldest granddaughter. Nevertheless I felt her. I felt those cool hands, their softness in mine and I smiled. My grandmother had lived so fully and slowly, I prayed for her soul and that I might follow her footsteps.

And now, despite my petty suffering, I looked back on this particular experience and I remember that most important thing she’d marked in her Bible: “Yeah, I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me (Psalm 23:4).”

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