The Missing Part of Me
By: Olga Marchuk
Tags: Grandparents, Memories, Family, Grandmother, Soul

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

The wind got tangled in my hair when I went out for a morning walk. My eyes burned. It was even hard to blink because the swollen eyelids after last night had not returned to their normal appearance. The reason for my bad look was The Farewell movie, which I watched before bedtime. The story of one granddaughter and her grandmother, who is destined to die soon, reminded me of my grandmothers, whom I miss so much.

I perfectly remember my mother’s parents because they passed away only a few years ago. But I don’t remember my father’s parents at all, because they died when I was only 8-10 years old. I have only some blurry memories…how I came to visit my grandparents and brought a homemade postcard with me. I gave her grandmother, but instead of smiling, she cried. And then I cried too, telling my dad that I did not understand why my grandmother was crying from my postcard. I just did not understand that she had had a stroke and could not smile at all, could not say “thank you”.

This is the only memory of my grandmother Pauline, and I don’t know why, but I can’t remember anything else. I did not know her at all, nor did the grandfather Gregory, her husband. They both survived the Second World War. Grandfather fought at the front, and grandmother at that time was somewhere near Magdeburg in Germany, where the Nazis sent her along with her sister from occupied Kyiv. Dad told me that she never wanted to talk about this period in her life, and no one ever knew her stories. Probably, if I were more adult then she would not have told me either, but at least I would have tried to find out. I would have tried to get to know my grandmother closer.

Sometimes it seems to me that there are two holes inside me that will always stay there. Because no one will tell me what kind of people my grandparents were. I can collect my own portraits from my father’s stories, but still this is not enough. I would like to ask them many questions: what was the meaning of their life, what they loved most, what they were afraid of, what inspired them, what they dreamed about.

It’s probably weird to want something that will never happen. To want my grandparents to be alive now so that we can have tea together and talk about their history. To want them to be present at my wedding and play with their great-grandchildren. To want to touch their wisdom of life, which I can not find in any books.

On May 19, more than a dozen years ago, my grandmother Pauline died. My mom reminded me of this yesterday, just after I watched the movie The Farewell. I completely forgot about it. Like the fact that on that very day, only tens of years later, her second son, my father’s older brother, died. Mother and son passed away on the same day. Sometimes life scares me with its mysterious incomprehensibility.

I know that the memories that I have about grandparents are very scarce to tell one day to my own children and grandchildren. But maybe the most important thing is still not the stories about their lives that I missed, but that special connection with their souls that I always feel, even after they are no longer with us on the earth. Perhaps this is enough to try to overcome the sadness that hurts so much.