Lives

As a child I could sit for hours in my grandmother's kitchen listening to her talk about the past, hers, others'. I would pester her with so many questions, anything that would come to mind, anything that maybe puzzled me the day before when looking again at the many family pictures stored in the old, tin box or in tattered photo albums. Like maybe if she loved her former family more than the one she ended up with - us. I always felt she was a little shifty when I raised the subject and ever reticent to get into much detail. As a child I never understood how painful it must've been, even decades later, to talk about your first husband whom she lost to the war, presumed dead somewhere in Russia, and her first child who died of meningitis at the age of 1, only months after losing her 

husband. Even then, being too young to understand all the nuances in life or anything about feelings and loss so great it could derail your entire life and destroy a spirit, I felt that if given a choice she'd probably choose them - the dead ones to be alive again and for her to live out the life she was meant to. As the little selfish brat that I was I always wanted her to say otherwise, and choose us - my grandpa, who she met and married in her 30's, both entering their second marriage, my mom - their daughter and us - me and my brother. I didn't know these choices never really existed as such, that life is never clear cut, that somebody can love what they have and still cherish the thought of having had something else before, especially when it was taken away from you so brutally.