12 30 pm pst   [ suicide ]

Suicide makes me think of my grandmother and uncle whom I never met. Each took their lives before I was born. I spoke with my mother about Grandma Ruth yesterday evening. She delights in telling me how much Grandma Ruth would have loved me.

We didn't talk about her often. She died when my mother was a junior in high school. My mother always refered to her as "my mother", so it wasn't until I was a teen that I came up with a name for her. My grandfathers are called by their last names: Grandpa P. and Grandpa R. My other grandmother was called Amah and her husband was Poppa. One day I had a question about my mother's mother and I refered to her as Grandma Ruth. That has been what we have called her ever since.

Apparently, on the day she died, she woke up in the morning and gave her husband a dollar, instructing him to send their oldest child to college. Then she took the bus to the bridge where she jumped. My grandfather saved that dollar all these years, but has lost it in the past decade.

We have four possessions which formerly belonged to Grandma Ruth. She was schizophrenic and spent half of every year in a mental hospital; we have a sock doll she made in the institution. We have a wonderful pair of green sunglasses she wore; both of the nose pieces are broken off. My grandfather had her wedding ring made into a necklace, which he gave to my mother a few years ago. The fourth item is a large gold cross. The voice my grandmother heard in her head was the voice of god. It was no doubt the voice that told her that she needed to leave this planet.

Grandma Ruth and I would have gotten along so well. I would have curled up on a chair in the kitchen while she baked cookies. We would have laughed and gossiped and she would have put flowers in my hair. I would have squaled with a giddy happiness every time she began a story with, "When your mother was little..."

I don't know many stories about when my mother was little. She has forgotten most everything, and even now her memory is terrible. Her mother was mentally ill. Her father was strict. She had three brothers and no sisters. They were very poor. She tells stories about the Welfare truck and hand-me-downs. She ate katsup sandwiches (katsup on white bread). She said the margine they got was white with a red dot in the middle, and your had to mush the dot around to turn the margerine the proper yellow color.

She says that once when she was ten she came home and her mother began screaming at her, claiming she was a prostitute who sold her body on the corner. My mother was terrified that her father would believe the story and breat her, but when he came home and heard the accusation, he roared at Grandma Ruth, "Have you lost your mind?!?" My mother's impersonations of her father are a riot.