The quilt

My grandmother has been gone for 13 years, but last night she came back.

When I picture her, she’s tucked up tightly under the quilt with its pastiche of colors: maroon, mustard, peacock, persimmon, cornflower, and a perfect cowboy bandana red.

She stuck with lighter colors for herself—retirement in Florida requires a lot of whites, peaches, pale blues dangling from plastic hangers—but the quilt was something more.

The quilt of many colors.

It lay across the enormous king-sized bed, the one that was always crisply made even when she was in it. That bed make her slender frame seem even tinier, maybe because she refused to fill it; she left the space to her right where Popsie should be.

He had died years before, but it seemed to me like she was holding that place for him as if he might return out of nowhere, ready to grab a drink, talk about the horses at the track, and sleep off a long day at the store. Even the kitschy figurines remained on his nightstand (“World’s Greatest Grandpa!” “I’d Rather Be Golfing!”), gifts from the cousins throughout the years.

I don’t recall that tableau ever changing one inch my entire life: The figurines, the heavy lamp, the old clock radio that you could hear tick when each new number flapped around into view.

The only times someone else would fill that expanse on the bed to Momsie’s right was when a grandchild had come down to visit.

It didn’t matter if I was fifteen or thirty; she would motion for me to come slide under the quilt with her to watch TV and escape the manufactured chill of the central air.

Sometimes we watched a game show. Sometimes a soap. Sometimes the local news. (My brother and I were big fans of Weaver the Weatherman, a name that seemed born in a Muppet Show writer’s room. )

Sometimes we even watched MTV together.

“But he’s ugly!” Momsie protested, trying to understand my affinity for the men dancing around an oil field, singing about rockin’ a casbah, whatever that was. “Well he’s neowuh Frank Sinatra,” she laughed, her Philly accent stretching the vowels to their limits.

“Eowuhld Blue Eyes. Now he was something.”

Years later I remember laying in that same bed as a young adult, watching the hours-long benefit Concert for New York City together after 9/11.

She was quite impressed with The Who.

Her warmth was bigger than she was, and it felt so protective in those dark weeks and months after the world fell apart. She offered to tickle my back, the term for back-scratching coined by my cousin Ryan when he was little.

She healed like the music we listened to.

Now that Thalia is 18, it seemed time.

Our home no longer presents a grievous risk of heirloom textile destruction at the hands of cats with sharp claws or small children and their myriad bodily fluids. So my mom sent me home last week with Momsie’s quilt, just as she’d promised to do all these years—but not before being extra-extra-sure that I really really wanted it and I wasn’t just saying that.

Yes. I really really wanted it.

And so it’s my quilt now.

There was something almost ritualistic about removing it from the sealed storage bin, shaking it out a bit, and folding it over the foot of our bed. It made me happy to look down at it, but it’s like I wasn’t ready to go Full Quilt. It stayed there for a few days while I adjusted to this new symphony of color across our otherwise solid bedding.

Last night though, it was cool enough to unfurl the quilt completely. I pulled it up and I slid my legs underneath.

I could have sworn I was seeing the outline of Momsie’s legs under there. Same as how, when I look down at the back of my hands now, I increasingly see her hands— the dendroidal pattern of blueish veins radiating out toward each individual finger. Slightly tan skin. Always soft. But her nails were always polished and perfect. Mine, not so much.

Last night, I slept under Momsie’s quilt for the first time in more than a decade.

We talk about death a lot lately. Death stays with us. But life stays with us too.

I’m not religious, and I don’t know about angels or reincarnation or the ghosts of small Victorian children we see in movies, but I do know about spirits. A spirit is not a ghost, it’s a life force. And how can the life force of someone you love not stay with you, become part of you forever in big and small ways, even after their body is gone?

I think that’s why I save so many things; the people I love live through them.

An old card from my brother holds an inside joke that would otherwise be forgotten. A weathered wooden spoon is a weekend making chocolate mousse with my dad. A quilt reveals a whole catalog of memories of a great-grandmother my kids will only know through the stories we tell about her.

I kind of wish I had the clock radio.

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