For Grandma Idyll

My grandma was Idyll Lucille Sannes. She was my dad’s mother. My grandfather, her husband, died back in 1990, when I was only two, so I never really got to know him. Grandma is the first grandparent I lost while I was old enough to understand it, old enough to have actually known her. I was ten when she passed, in the fall of 1998, and she is the reason I know what it feels like to lose someone you love for the very first time.

This is the picture I want to lead with. It is one of her birthdays, and there she is with the balloon and the cake and the flowers, glasses on, that soft permed hair, looking exactly like I remember her. I have always known she died on September 15, 1998, one single day before her seventy-fifth birthday. She almost made it to the next cake. What I am only piecing together now, writing this, is the timeline of it all: how old I was, how everything lined up, where she fits in the order of the people I have loved and lost.

Where she came from

Idyll was born on September 16, 1923, in Edinburg, North Dakota, way up near the Canadian border. She was one of a huge family. Her parents, Oliver and Mabel Sannes, had something like a dozen kids, and the names read like a roll call from another century: Conrad, Mandus, Lloyd, Marvin, Pearl, Alice, Leonard, Gerald, and on down the line. She grew up in farm country, in little Walsh County towns like Kensington and Park River, the kind of places where everybody knew everybody.

In 1941, when she was just seventeen, she married my grandfather, Czar Harley Hertzelle. They settled in Grand Forks and had three children: my uncle Roger, my aunt Cheryl, and my dad, Marlin. My grandfather died in 1990, so by the time I really knew her she was a widow, living on her own in North Dakota, and she carried it with a lot of grace.

North Dakota and the wind

We lived in Missouri, so seeing her meant a long trip north. She lived in a high-rise apartment building in Grand Forks, up off the ground, and to a kid from the suburbs that felt like something out of a movie.

What I remember most is the wind. North Dakota wind is not like Missouri wind. It comes straight across all that flat open land with nothing to slow it down, and it will lean on you. I remember actually leaning back into it, the way you do when you are little and the world hands you a wind strong enough to hold you up. I think about that whenever I think about visiting her. The cold, the flatness, the wind, and Grandma somewhere at the center of it.

The quarter

Here is the one that everybody in my family still tells. When I was small I managed to swallow a quarter. I do not have a good explanation for this. I was a kid, the quarter was there, and down it went.

Somehow the response to this crisis was to get Grandma Idyll on the phone. I remember being handed the receiver and explaining to my grandmother, in whatever words a little kid has, that I had eaten money. She did not panic. She was calm and warm about the whole thing the way grandmas are, and the quarter, I am happy to report, eventually sorted itself out. But for some reason that phone call is welded into my memory. Of all the things to remember a person by, mine is confessing a swallowed quarter to her over the phone.

Bun Bun

Grandma gave me a stuffed rabbit when I was little, and I named him Bun Bun. He is, without exaggeration, the most loved object I have ever owned. The fur is gone. Worn right off him in places from decades of being held. One of his eyes is just a button now. He is not in good shape, and that is the entire point. You do not wear a thing down like that without loving it half to pieces.

I still have him. When things get hard, when I really need it, I hold onto Bun Bun and I talk to my grandma. I pray to her. It is the closest thing I have to sitting with her again, and the fact that the rabbit came from her hands is what makes it work. He is a little piece of her that I get to keep.

Here he is. You can see how much he has been held. That is not damage, that is love measured in years.

Saying goodbye

The funeral, in 1998, was the first one I ever went to that meant something to me. I did not have a framework for it yet. I just knew the world had a hole in it where my grandmother used to be.

Two moments stayed with me. One was my cousin Paula, who pulled me into a hug when I needed it without my having to ask. I was a ten-year-old who did not know what to do with any of this, and she just held on, and somehow that was the right thing. The other was my aunt Cheryl, Grandma’s daughter, the moment she saw the casket. That is a sound and a feeling I have never forgotten, a daughter losing her mother, right out in the open where a kid could see what grief really is.

I have lost more people since then, and every time, some part of me goes back to that fall in 1998 and the lessons it taught me without asking.

Grandma Idyll was kind, and she was loving, and she came from a big warm family in a cold flat place, and she gave me a rabbit that I still hold when I am scared. That is not a small thing to leave behind. It is, honestly, about the biggest thing a person can.

I love you, Grandma. One day short of seventy-five, and never one day out of my mind.