Don’t Look Back

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/well/family/grief-child-loss-grandparents.html

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On a summer day in the mid-1960s when I was 7, I drove across Idaho with my grandparents. When I got queasy from reciting headlines off the newspaper in my grandmother’s lap — showing off my new ability to read — she told me to look out the window, to find highway signs as we drove past lumpy basalt fields and wide acres of potato farms.

We were on our way to a family farm near Jerome, where my grandparents lived in the early years of their marriage. My mother was born at a small hospital there, as were her three brothers and a sister, though of the five babies my mother was the sole survivor — a loss never spoken of in my family.

My rotund grandfather drove. He rested a hand on the steering wheel and kept the other tipped toward the cracked window, a cigarette pinched between thumb and finger. My grandmother twitched and fussed, reorganizing the console, rubbing dust off an apple meant to keep her husband awake if he drooped. And I searched for words to read.

Suddenly I saw some — a bright yellow line of language imprinted on asphalt, racing toward my grandfather’s Wagoneer. I’d seen it before, this golden flash, but now I could make out what it said: “Don’t be a …” Except for the last word, a confusing jumble. Seven letters spread across the highway in capital letters: “GUBERIF.”

“What is it?” I said to my grandmother. She laughed and asked my grandfather to turn around, to come at the words on the road again, slower, so I might figure out the puzzle. He grunted and kept driving, which didn’t surprise me. I had many times witnessed his reluctance to turn back if we forgot an item or needed the bathroom. I remember feeling thwarted and frustrated about the word on the road, but I didn’t argue with my grandfather. His stoic silence was a wall none of us ventured to climb.

As a child, I spent more time with my grandmother, though I waited for Grandpa to arrive home from work so I could sit with him while he sipped whiskey and ate slices of cheese. He broke walnuts with his nutcracker, laying the tender meat in the circle of my palm. He mostly dodged questions about his childhood, about the death of his youngest brother, the family’s troubles during the Depression. He grew tight and quiet when confronted with the past, perseverance being his central creed.

He didn’t talk about his wife, in her mid-20s, giving birth to twin boys in the Jerome Hospital. Both infants were ill, deemed too fragile for their mother’s touch, so she watched through a glass bassinet until their lives winked out. My mother was the next born and then, two years later, a boy who lived a few hours. A girl was last, stillborn, the only one to not draw a breath. The final two fell victim to their mother’s Rh-negative blood, meaning my grandmother had produced antibodies that proved fatal to her newborns — a conundrum to doctors in a small hospital in Idaho.

What my grandmother believed was she had failed, that she was an unforgivable failure. What my grandfather believed was there was no reason to gnaw on that amplitude of pain. It was his way to feel the loss like a single hammer blow, to shake it off. To move on.

It must have been my grandfather who decided that no one should speak of the dead children. I’m guessing he made this pact with the various branches of family, their friends, trickling down to my siblings and me when we were old enough to hear our mother’s strongest admonition: Never, ever bring up our grandmother’s babies. After the last baby died, our grandfather had packed up his household and left Jerome to move to a mountain town, where he and Mamie raised their one child without referring to the others, without a single item in the house in remembrance. An erasure, an absence, that rings in me to this day.

I’m certain my grandfather acted out of compassion for his wife — his notion, anyway, of what she needed, which was actually what he needed, to get through the string of tragedy. But he died of a heart attack when he was just 64, gone suddenly, as if a plate had fallen from a shelf and shattered. As if my grandparents’ shared anguish could no longer be held inside him.

The children are buried in the Jerome Cemetery, a yawning parcel of grassy land with a few mildly rolling hills. Four infants under a tombstone that reads, “Budded on Earth to Bloom in Heaven.” That summer of my seventh year, and while I was still puzzling the meaning of “guberif,” our route would have taken us past the cemetery. I realize now our startling proximity: The car must have passed within a mile of the babies’ graves. If there was an abrupt stillness, or if my grandmother turned to stare out the other window to avoid the ground that held her children, I missed that flinch in her. It didn’t occur to me — how could it? — that I should be solemn, that I should snuggle into my grandmother’s body to comfort this woman I so loved.

We didn’t pull over so Mamie could sit by her children’s graves, leave a bouquet from her garden, water the small tree that shades the tombstone. I don’t remember my grandfather even slowing down, not on that trip or the dozens of others we took together. So now I live in a fog of regret. Regret that I didn’t ask him to tell me about the uncles and aunt I would not meet. Regret that I didn’t urge him to let Mamie speak about her babies, or to stand in the cemetery and hold me, a child alive and devoted to her, while she wept out grief carved into her like a cave, like a damp pocket in the earth where animals go to die.

Instead, what passed among the three of us that afternoon was an innocuous tension, nearly unnoticeable, because my grandfather had shrugged off the jumbled word I’d spotted on the road, dismissing the silly game concocted by the highway department. To his mind, there was no reason to tell me I need only look into the rearview mirror to turn guberif into firebug. As if the real lesson he was trying, consciously or not, to impart that day had nothing to do with the puzzle on the road, but instead was a reminder to train my eyes forward, to storm through the land of sorrow without hesitation, and to never, ever look back.

Debra Gwartney is the author, most recently, of “I Am a Stranger Here Myself.”