My grandmother was wealthy for two years of her life.
Two years, though all she ever wanted
was to live in comfort.
She was born into the Great Depression
and told stories of her family
sharing a single can of Spam for dinner.
She married my grandfather, a restless man
who fixed the phone lines and worked too hard
just to keep his family fed.
He was unfaithful; she was furious.
My grandmother held on to everything
and in her dim attic, my mom and I discovered
box after box of old newspaper clippings,
cards, photos, letters of apology from the man
who cheated her second husband out of all his money.

My grandmother was dying,
and every night my mom came home
from visiting her at hospice
I would sit on my bed upstairs
as I listened to her in the kitchen
unpacking boxes,
raw from her own divorce,
holding in the tears,
her strangled sobs covered by her hands
and I wanted more than anything
to go downstairs and tell her she could cry
let it go
that she didn’t have to hold on
but instead I stared at my hands,
fingers twisting and curling like dying things
and pretended I couldn’t hear.

At my grandmother’s wake,
my aunts looked over the messy scribblings
that she had written to the nurses
in her last weeks
when she could no longer speak
and when my aunt Linny turned over a page
and I glanced at where, in shaky scrawl
the words “kill me” had been scratched,
my aunt quietly crumpled up the page
and held it in her hand.