Eulogy for a grandmother

My grandmother had a set of good dishes, white with a thin gold rim, that she brought from Poland in 1956 in a suitcase with almost nothing else in it. For sixty years, we ate off them every Christmas Eve, and every Christmas Eve she counted them twice when we left.

I'm Anna, the oldest of Helena's seven grandchildren.

Babcia was nineteen when she arrived in Chicago. She did not speak English, she had one suitcase, and she had a cousin's address written on a piece of paper. Within five years she had learned English from the radio, found a job at a bakery, and married my grandfather, Stan, who came in every morning to buy one roll and, as she said, "to look."

She worked at that bakery for thirty years. She raised three children, then helped raise seven grandchildren, and fed, as far as we can tell, most of the neighborhood.

My story is small. When I was ten, I broke one of the good dishes, drying it too fast after Christmas dinner. I cried so hard I couldn't breathe. She took the pieces from my hands, put them in a drawer, and said, in her careful English, "Dishes are for people. Not people for dishes." Then she gave me a piece of poppy seed cake and we never spoke of it again.

Last month, cleaning her kitchen, we found that drawer. The pieces were still there, wrapped in a napkin. She had kept them. I don't know why. I like to think it was so she could remember the day she taught me the most important thing she knew.

Babcia leaves us her recipes, which we will never make as well as she did, her good dishes, minus one, and the certainty that people come first.

Babcia, dziękuję. Thank you for coming all that way with one suitcase. Look at everything you built.

Grandma played cards every Thursday for forty years and took our allowance money every summer. She said it was to teach us about risk. We think she just liked to win.

Grandma taught me to knit when I was eight. I was terrible. She said I just needed patience. I think she was talking about more than knitting.

Every one of us knew that Grandma prayed for us by name every night. When things went wrong, it was a comfort to know somebody was already on it.

In the last years, Grandma sometimes forgot our names. But she never forgot to ask if we had eaten. That was who she really was, underneath everything.