I Wish I Could Have Told Her

by Kristin Johnson

Death didn’t seem to appear very often in popular songs in the 1980s. If it did, it was usually an angry, defiant “life is hard, and then you die” alternative sound. In the Living Years was the only song I ever heard in that decade that talked about death so personally. Maybe I was listening to the wrong songs.

Likewise, most songs talked about love and romance and longing. The concept of telling fathers and sons to communicate was alien, but it was an indication of the touchy-feely, “get in touch with your feminine side” movement. It was a novel concept: Men could actually express emotions. Men actually regretted not getting along with their fathers.

I found this all interesting, since I was a girl in high school at the time and had a decent relationship with my father. The song really didn’t talk about the pressures of manhood, but the necessity of “opening up a quarrel,” to misquote the song. To actually tell your father, “Look, you’re going to die someday, and I don’t want to feel guilty wondering what I could have said.”

Being a woman, I didn’t have this problem. I told my father what I thought of him, good and bad, on a regular basis. Of my family, the one I didn’t talk to honestly, and most regret that I didn’t, was my grandmother, Hannah Barbara Johnson, my father’s mother.

I don’t mean that we didn’t have a pleasant relationship. I mean that I let family difficulties, which I won’t belabor, separate me from talking to her, at a time when she needed her family.

I can still remember the graceful way she moved, the way she wanted to collect the curls from my wild auburn hair and add them to her straight, fine graying brown hair. And I remember the way she looked in front of her mirror in the hall of her apartment.

I didn’t stay overnight with Grandma and Grandpa Johnson often. In fact, I slept on their couch only once. I remember that in the morning Grandma Johnson made a point of introducing me to one of her neighbors and saying, “How do you do?” She told me as we left the older gentleman sunning on the front step, “You should always say, ‘How do you do.’”

My mother’s mother, Kay Liebold, a.k.a. Gaga, whose house I practically lived in growing up, likes to tell more colorful stories about Grandma Johnson. Both women smoked (even now, at eighty-five, my Gaga still sneers at anti-smoking commercials), and my Grandpa Johnson disapproved of smoking. At family gatherings, the two women would sneak off to have a drink and a cigarette.

I didn’t know this about Grandma Johnson while she lived. In fact, I didn’t see her for five years. She had been in poor shape emotionally during that time, thanks to a conflict with my grandfather, who she’d separated from after 57 years of marriage. Unfortunately, the divorce divided my father’s family, and because the aunts sided with their mother, my dad had to help out his father. The conflict released some other family quarrels that I thought were a reason to not see my grandmother, particularly since she lived in northern Michigan with one of my aunts, and was emotionally frail.

Contrast that with my grandfather, who I saw on Halloween weekend in 1998 when he was just beginning to become ill, and to lose his appetite. I remember that on Monday morning, when I was leaving to go back to school, I told him I loved him. The following week, he died with my Gaga and mother, who had hopped on the first plane from Michigan, holding his hand. I was in my master’s program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and my grandparents lived during the winter two hours away in Palm Desert.

I can remember exactly what I was doing when my dad told me my papa was dying. It was 7:30 a.m. California time and I’d just heated up instant Folgers coffee (tasted foul but woke me right up) in my dormitory room. The phone rang.

I can remember Dad’s exact words: “Kristin, you need to get to the desert. Papa’s dying.”

I can remember that since I didn’t have a car, I called the shuttle service I normally used to visit my grandparents. I remember Mel, born Mohammed in Iran, who made a special trip to bring me to my loved ones even though it wasn’t his day to work. He offered to drive me to the hospital.

I remember my mother telling me “Papa’s gone.” I went outside and screamed to the heavens.

I don’t remember my mother telling me Grandma Johnson died. I don’t know what I was doing. I don’t remember the last time I saw her. For five years I kept telling myself, “We weren't that close, anyway.”

Now, every time my Gaga tells me the story about sneaking off to have a drink and cigarette, I smile despite myself, and wish I had known the woman who gave my father life.

The one thing I could do for her was to write a poem, “In Her Image.” I have written poems whenever someone I love has died: my grandfather, my artist friend Janice Epstein, my friends John Marquez and Erik Widmark, my writing professor Ben Masselink (love ya, Ben, always.)

“In Her Image” focused on the image I still had of my grandmother: her grace, her gentleness, and the way she kept house, her smile, and her fragility. The poem, which was never read at my grandmother’s funeral, was my way of telling her what “I wish I could have told her in the living years.” But I like to think that she saw it. I like to think that she knew what I wanted to tell her…in the living years.