We never talked about my grandmother on my father’s side.
I didn’t really take notice of her absence until I was about 10 or so. I’ve always been close with my grandparents on my mother’s side, so I never really felt like I lacked anything in that department. I suppose it just hadn’t occurred to me at that point that I should have two sets of grandparents. That is, until I had to do a family tree project for school, and I realized I had no idea how to fill in a few branches.
When I went to Dad to ask about them he seemed reluctant to acknowledge their existence. He only gave me the bare minimum of information needed for the project: their names, and a couple of old, wallet-size photos. The only thing about these people that was familiar to me was our shared last name. Examining their photos, I felt a strange sense of dissonance when I attempted to think of them as my grandparents. When I thought of grandparents, my mind went to kind-looking older folks, sage advice, and the occasional fresh baked cookie. When I looked at these people, I felt none of that warmth. They seemed oddly severe, the both of them wearing a frown in their photos. The man seemed shriveled and wiry, and carried a sense of hollowness in his gaze. The woman was a tad bit plump, and wore a flowery dress. Her eyes were small and somewhat beady, carrying nothing in the way of kindness. They looked like the people I’d seen in photos from the Great Depression.
When I tried to ask Dad about them he refused to say anything more on the subject. He seemed almost angry with me for trying to ask him, just barely restraining himself from yelling, so I didn’t attempt to press him further. Eventually, my young mind wandered off to other things and I soon forgot about them, for the most part. It wasn’t until I was 15 that I heard mention of them again, at which point I would have the displeasure of meeting my grandmother.
My dad received a strange letter in the mail one day. The paper was so yellowed with age that it looked like it could have been in transit for over 30 years, yet it apparently had only been posted a few days prior. I would eventually learn that it was from my grandmother, and that she was notifying us of and inviting us to the funeral of her husband, my grandfather. My parents fought for some time on whether or not to go, the first time I’d ever actually seen or heard them do so. My dad, strangely enough, wanted to go, and Mom was trying to convince him otherwise. I didn’t hear a lot of what was said, given that most of the fight took place in their bedroom, but from what I could tell she was very concerned about whether or not seeing her would be good for his mental wellbeing. Eventually though, they settled on going, and I was to come along as well.
The event itself was unremarkable. It was at a small church about a six hour drive away, in a small town that I had never been to or heard of. I didn’t recognize anyone there, and I only barely recognized the man in the coffin as the same person I’d seen in the photo all those years ago. I felt incredibly awkward being there, and mostly ended up simply following my parents around as they had brief, polite conversations with some of the other attendees.
I smelled my grandmother before I saw her. The odor I suddenly caught wind of from amidst the crowd of people made me think that perhaps there was another, improperly embalmed, dead body there which somebody had left sitting in a pool of its own excrement. I clutched at my nose, trying in vain to block out the smell. I wasn’t the only one either, as my parents and many people around us were doing the same, though managing to be a bit more discreet about it. People didn’t seem concerned about where the smell was coming from. They more so seemed determined to not acknowledge it. That confused me for a bit, until the crowd happened to part slightly and I finally saw her.
She sat in a broken down looking hover-round, the sheer girth of her obscene obesity barely contained within it. I have never been the type to judge a person based off of their weight, but the sheer size of this woman spoke of an excess that was not reasonable in any regard. Even that, however, was overshadowed by her apparent complete disregard for any semblance of personal hygiene. The dress she wore may have been nice at one point, but was now nothing but a cacophony of stains pulled taught over countless rolls of skin. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it almost seemed to be the same one I had seen her wearing in the photo. Her hair hung grey and stringy, noticeably thinning around the top of her head. Her face was pockmarked, greasy, and clearly unwashed, a halfhearted attempt at makeup already beginning to drip downwards like some sort of oil slick. It was immediately apparent that she was the source of the smell.
It took me a moment to realize that this was my grandmother, as she looked only vaguely similar to the slightly plump older woman I had seen in the old photo. My parents were just as shocked as I was. Dad stood frozen, simply staring blankly, and Mom’s jaw hung slightly agape. My grandmother noticed our gazes then, turning the struggling hover-round slightly to face us. Her eyes fixed on us, beady, black, and oddly small in her face. The rest of her appearance repulsed me, sure, but something about those eyes made feel an instinctual fear. It was less like I was looking at a morbidly obese, elderly woman, and more like I was staring down a Great White shark, poised to bite me in half. Our gazes met then. She smiled, revealing two rows of black, rotten teeth.
Neither my parents or I were particularly comfortable staying long after that, and we soon left. Once in the car, my parents briefly commented on how “different” my grandmother looked now, before ultimately falling silent once more as we pulled out of the gravel parking lot. It was a tenuous sort of silence, like there was a great weight of things going unsaid. I didn’t press either of them with questions though, remembering how Dad had reacted last time. Eventually, after some time, Dad began to speak. It was less of a conversation and more of an unloading of a mass of things he had kept from me all these years. I didn’t dare interrupt to ask him any questions, afraid that if I interrupted him it would dam up the stream again.
His upbringing had been relatively normal at first. His parents were your typical stern Catholics; strict, but not unkind. They were happy, for the most part. However, around his 14th birthday, something changed. Something inside his mother, my grandmother, broke all of a sudden. It was like somewhere, deep at the core of her being, there was this massive pustule that contained the sum of all vile things associated with the human condition, and one day it just burst, staining the entirety of her person with its evil. She became cruel, violent, and abusive, striking out at both her husband and son in vicious fits of rage. It would have been easier if she had just gone completely off the rails, but she retained some measure of her sanity; enough to be clever and calculating, and manage to hide her sudden change from anyone outside of the family. His father, my grandfather, a weak-willed, meek sort of man, tried his best to defend his son, but failed to do so in the end. Eventually, he devolved into a passive onlooker, too busy self-medicating with drugs and alcohol to resist against his changed wife.
Things escalated over time, and Dad eventually left home at 17 after my grandmother nearly bit off 3 of his fingers on his right hand, leaving him with permanent nerve damage. He and my grandmother had never reconciled or spoken since, and the records of the incident taken from his visit to the hospital following it were enough for a restraining order to be filed. He left town, moving to the city and never looking back. Eventually, he met my mother at 19 and they started dating and then married.
He still resented my grandfather, even now, for not protecting him from my grandmother. Though, he regretted cutting off all contact with him as well, and basically abandoning him with her. This lingering regret is why he felt obligated to come to his funeral, on some level.
I asked only one question: Why didn’t either he or his father try to get her into some sort of psychiatric treatment or facility, when there was so very clearly something wrong with her?
He told me there were many reasons for this. His dad’s negligence, his own status as a minor, the failures of how hospitals at the time handled mental illness, and the mindset of a small, religious town all contributed to where things ended up. However, he acknowledged that, if he had stuck around, perhaps he could have maybe eventually got her the treatment she needed. But, on this, he had only one thing to say.
“You could devote your entire life to curing cancer. You could work yourself to the bone, tear your life to shreds, and sacrifice everything just to cure that disease. However, in spite of it all, the best solution will still sometimes be to just cut the tumor out.”
___
I wouldn’t hear anything more about my grandmother for another 10 years after this, when, all of a sudden, I received a letter of my own.
There was nothing to indicate outwardly that the letter was about her. It was in a crisp, clean envelope that looked nothing like the ancient piece of mail that my father had received. It wasn’t from an address I recognized, and was apparently from a lawyer that I had never heard of who operated out of a town I had never been to. Perplexed, and having no idea what the piece of mail could possibly be about, I simply opened and read the thing. What I found inside seemed to come completely out of left field.
My grandmother had passed away a few days ago, and I had been named the sole beneficiary in her will. Essentially, the purpose of the letter was to inform me of this, and to ask me to visit the lawyer at his office to discuss the details.
I wasn’t sure how to take any of it, honestly. Why name me, someone she had never had any semblance of a relationship with, as her sole beneficiary? Why not my father? Or somebody she actually knew? I couldn’t come to a conclusion at the time, lacking any sort of information to go off of, so I simply decided to go and talk with the lawyer, hoping that her reasons would simply illuminate themselves.
I wish now that I had simply ignored it all. This “inheritance” of hers has given me nothing but trouble and trauma. I figure that leaving it all to me was just some sort of sick joke on her part. A way of cruelly lashing out at us one last time. She’s dead now, so who knows for sure? Either way, I hope she burns in hell, the damn witch.
The meeting with the lawyer was brief, but informative. Basically, I was left to make sense of the mess she had left behind. If I preferred, I could relinquish my rights to her assets, property, and such, but he recommended that I at least inspect the property first to determine if there was anything of personal value to either me or my father that I may want. He did stress though, that there was likely nothing of any sort of monetary value to be claimed, as my grandmother had been quite destitute at the time of her passing.
Ultimately, I decided to at least pay a visit to the property in question, a small house out in the middle of the woods. I figured, if anything, I should do it for the sake of my father. He had left his entire childhood behind him when he had to run away from her. I figured now was my chance to take some of it back for him.
As such, after our brief meeting, the lawyer and I went to the property to examine it together. It was about an hour drive away from the lawyer’s office, just outside of the little town I had visited during the funeral. It was a small, ranch-style house at the end of a series of dirt roads that led aimlessly into the woods, completely isolated from most forms of civilization. It was broken down and poorly cared for, looking like it had been abandoned for much longer than the few days it had been since my grandmother’s death.
Upon nearing the half-rotted through front door, the lawyer handed me a spare handkerchief he had pulled out of his pocket. He was already covering his own mouth and nose with one of a similar design, and recommended I do the same. I listened, of course, wondering what I had managed to get myself into.
The inside of the house looked more like a junkyard than a home. If you’ve ever seen one of those reality TV shows about hoarders, imagine one of those houses, the worst one you can conjure from memory, and multiply the filth by at least 10 times. I wouldn’t call myself particularly neat, and I certainly don’t mind a little bit of clutter. However, I feel that the sheer magnitude of the garbage contained within this home would have put even the worst hoarder off. I felt that every moment spent in that foul home was taking minutes off of my life. I had thought that the smell my grandmother had carried during the funeral was bad, but after visiting the slag pit that had birthed that odor, it seemed like fresh linen and daisies in comparison.
There wasn’t even any sort of rhyme or reason to any of the items contained within. There was nothing in the way of organization, and most things just seemed to be straight up garbage in every sense of the word. Half of the first room we entered, the kitchen, was actually dominated by a steadily rotting pile of what appeared to be food remains, while the rest of it was piled up with things like newspapers, old broken clocks, and what appeared to be a stack to twigs from the yard. There was no apparent care for any of the items, and nothing suggesting any sort of theme to her collection. It was as if she had simply treated the house as a whole as her garbage can. Clearly, her mental condition had only worsened over the years.
I was nearly certain at a glance that there would be nothing here that dad could ever want, but the lawyer had already forged a path ahead through the piles. Sighing a bit, I followed him in, having decided to at least try to not make this trip a complete waste of time. Perhaps there were indeed some diamonds in the rough to be found.
As I followed him, we came upon a slightly widened path through the heaps that we could walk on somewhat comfortably without having to worry about slipping on a rotten banana peel and falling into a pile of dirty clothes and half-empty milk jugs. We followed the path further into the home until we came to the living room. There was a suspicious looking clear space in the middle of the room, as well as traces of something large having been dragged directly through the mess and to the nearby backdoor. Examining the clear space in more detail, I found that you could even tell from it that the original color of the carpet was white, instead of a murky brown.
Noticing my gaze, the lawyer felt the need to let me know that the space was actually where my grandmother had died. Apparently she had passed in her armchair, and had practically fused to it by the time she was discovered. Firemen had to drag the whole thing out the backdoor before they could cut her loose and bag up the body. I gave the man a disgusted look for the unwanted information, but he simply shrugged it off.
Glancing at one of the piles that had been split open while removing the armchair, and finding that, if you went deep enough, eventually it just turned into a sort of black goo, I decided I was just going to give the place a quick once-over and get out as soon as possible. I looked about the place, going into one of the few rooms I could actually manage to enter. It had been so long since many of them had been actually used, that most of them were simply filled with stuff and used as storage. The theme of lacking any sort of theme was continued here, and I had nothing to go off of to determine what any of the rooms had been originally used for, let alone which one used to be Dad’s bedroom. That is, excluding the bathroom. I could tell which room that was from a mile away by the smell alone. That, and the suspicious looking stains that surrounded the base of the door, seeping out into the carpet around it. I certainly had no intention of breaking the seal on whatever was contained behind that door.
I gave up rather quickly. I didn’t see much of anything of any value during my search, and anything I did find that could have been worth something was in such a state that it wasn’t worth the time required to lug it out of there. Returning to the living room, I found the lawyer glancing about the room, seemingly confused and occasionally looking back to a sheaf of papers in his hands. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that, apparently, there was supposed to be a basement in the house, but he couldn’t find the entrance to it anywhere. Intrigued by this, I joined him in his search.
Eventually, upon closer inspection, we found the door to the basement in the kitchen, the edge of its frame just barely hidden behind the terrarium that only slightly still resembled a fridge. It seemed more than a little suspicious, the door being hidden like that, and I was a bit wary of actually finding out what was behind the door. After seeing the rest of the house, I was certain that it couldn’t be good. However, whether I went down or not, the lawyer apparently had to go down there to inspect some meters or something before he could legally start to try and get rid of the trash heap of a house. In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and, after helping the lawyer shift the sticky hunk of machinery blocking it, I followed him through the door as we descended into the basement.
It was dark, the electricity having been shut off long ago, but the lawyer had thankfully thought to bring a flashlight. As the beam of light lit up the old, wooden stairs, the first thing that struck me was how clean it was. A little dusty, sure, but compared to the rest of the house it was practically sterile. We made our way down the stairs slowly, trying to put as little weight as possible onto the creaky boards for fear of them splintering. Eventually, we reached the bottom, finding something odd sitting at the foot of the stairs. A slightly rusty, old toy train. I picked it up and gave it a curious once-over, wondering if it had belonged to my dad.
Still holding the little toy train, I followed the beam of light cast by the flashlight with my eyes as the lawyer swept it across the room. The basement was… strange, to say the least. The floors and walls were all covered with multicolor foam padding, much like a children’s playroom. Various toys were scattered about, most of them old and worn, but still in decent condition. There were windows at the top of the walls that had originally led to the surface, but they seemed to have been intentionally buried at some point. I briefly wondered if this was where Dad used to play. But then, the beam of light focused on something… different. Something that made my blood run cold at the sight of it. A heavy, rusty chain, fastened directly to the concrete wall in-between two sections of padding.
The beam froze on this for a moment, the lawyer shocked by what we had discovered as well. He let out a singular “Oh…” as he shuddered, the beam shaking slightly. He then followed the chain downwards, as it trailed down the wall and snaked about the room. Eventually, it disappeared under the stairs we had just come down. He focused the beam there.
“Oh god, no.” the lawyer said.
I didn’t stick around long, opting to quickly rush up the stairs and out of the house. I hunched over in the front lawn, breathing heavily in panic. I didn’t see much, but I saw enough for it to haunt me for the rest of my life.
A shackle. A skeletal ankle, far too small to be an adult. A bony foot ending in rough, gnawed off stubs where toes used to be.
I thought of black, rotten teeth, smiling viciously at me from across the room, and emptied the contents of my stomach onto the lawn.
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