A last gift from the mango tree

I went out to Miami last week to help sort through my grandmother’s stuff who we lost suddenly a few weeks ago. I say suddenly, my grandmother was 97, but the condition that took her came fast and irreversibly and the effect of her loss on my family was seismic. Abuela was teeny, less than 5 foot tall and shrinking, you had to duck in her house not to hit your head on hanging decorations. I wrote about her last couple days here and it broke my heart to do it once so I’m gonna let anyone who wants to hear about the matriarch of my family read it. She brought my family to this country from Havana, she made the best black beans I’ve ever had, she was the funniest person I’ve ever met. The last conscious act of her life that anyone witnessed was a gag to make her family laugh.

In my late teens I moved to Miami and spent as much time with her as I could manage. We were hopeless goofballs both and I loved to make her laugh. She was stoic about Cuba but she answered all my questions and when I went there the first time she gave me the information I needed to go seek out the places my family had come from. She didn’t cry often around me, but the one time that hit me hardest, both good and bad, was hearing her reaction to some photos I’d taken of an apartment building in La Habana Vieja where she’d lived as a kid. She never expected to see it again, was sure it was gone. She told stories about being a mischievous little demon child throwing stuff at the mail man from the cover of the upstairs balcony.

I offered to help go through the house last week knowing it would hurt but that it would hurt more if I never got to walk through her front door again. In hindsight I don’t know that there was anything I could do to avoid how sad this whole summer has felt for me.

Without Abuela at its heart, the home that had grown out of her interests seemed almost to have fallen over on its back like some ancient fossil in the sand, all of these tiny bits of her sitting unbroken but without purpose like the shells of light bulbs that no longer fit. She had a wall full of souvenir plates from everywhere she’d been and refused to accept any from places she hadn’t. She had religious icons inconspicuously placed in every room and extras not readily visible, tiny crucifixes stored like pencils waiting in drawers. Above all there were silly things that made her smile, the faces of her family cut into tiny picture frames like lockets, a shrine to Miss Piggy like a royal figure, hundreds of images of cows, spotted figurines and blankets and pillows and sassy placards. You wouldn’t know how sad a cow in sunglasses can make you until it’s all that’s left.

I focused mostly on photos, some dating back over 100 years, sorting them into piles by timeline and household and then scanning them and adjusting the files where they’d faded and warped so that their moments would outlive the amber they were cast in. I hired myself as an amateur family historian and dug through memories of my own life observed, small moments I’d lost, hiding with others from before I existed, fanned out over decades in a series of drawers in her home office. I’m still working on cataloging it all and their power is immeasurable and sometimes devastating. Random vacations printed on paper too small to interpret, holy communion dresses passed down over years, a child’s face time-traveling across generations. My tiny grandma as a little girl, the span of her whole life somehow already in her eyes. Born in a different world, carrying it with her into these rooms.

My grandmother had a mango tree and it’s not the sermonizing of a funeral pulpit that brings me to say it gave the best mangos I’ve ever had. She passed just before their season and when it followed, the neighborhood stole them by the hefty bag knowing she was gone. The prices of airfare this summer were unusually ridiculous so by the time I managed to land in Miami last week the season had passed and I was trying not to let it get to me that I’d missed my last chance to add those sensations to my last visit.

When I got to the house its silence knocked the wind out of me. I’m not embarrassed by tears, but to avoid dragging my family into a sadness they were already swimming in daily without my help, I unlocked the back door out to the lake and stepped out to stare out at the water and let it out. Long after the mangos were all gone, impossibly, sitting there perfectly centered on the ground under the tree as if placed there somehow, there was a single mango like a power-up from an old Atari game. One of those hallmark moments you’d roll your eyes at in a movie. I went over expecting it to be rotted through, the bright colors atop hiding a carcass eaten by the menagerie of weird animals that you’d always find out there eating them. But it was perfect. Bigger than my hand and not so much as a blemish visible.

I drove back from Miami, a drive I’ve done 100 times and swore I’d never do again.

As a kid we’d ride 7 deep in a red VW punchbuggy, me in the cubby behind the back seat, reading a book for 1300 miles. My siblings fighting between me and the front seats focused on the highway. We’d buy fireworks in the Carolinas where they were legal and make one overnight stop at South of the Border, a “Mexican”-motif motel and theme park on Route 95 where we’d set them off and watch them burn the sky. We’d pull into Abuela’s house Christmas eve or Christmas morning and open presents on the floor by her tree. Presents she’d hand out on her birthday. I got my first comic book there, and though I had bought a plane ticket to go home this time, I chose instead to load a rental car up with cow coffee mugs and a Miss Piggy bank and Christmas ornaments, some of them older than me, and make the pilgrimage home this one last time, driving 3 days north, the last 4 hours swimming upstream in flash floods up the northeast, dodging the waterfalls of tractor trailers weaving through monsoon rains like they were Honda Civics on a manic joyride. The rain cleared up just as I hit NY, me and the car running on fumes just after midnight. Unpacking the car at the hydrant outside and carrying the boxes upstairs in waves like an ant without friends. I ate the last mango of the season at my kitchen sink, lost inside a childhood memory still happening, my face streaked like a 3 year old eating spaghetti, the dripping juice filling the bowl like soup, still trying to make my grandmother laugh.

at one point I had a beeper