When I was seven years old, my great-grandmother died.
I had been told that she was dying, so it wasn’t a sudden event and as my mother sat deeply into her squatting legs in the twilight morning and woke me so many hours before school, I knew what she was going to say.
“Grandma Virginia is dead.”
I rolled over and cried. I cried for the woman who taught me to crochet; for the frail woman in long dresses whom I remembered from summers in Oklahoma.
I cried because I felt that I was supposed to.
But the truth about Virginia Tally is more complicated than simply that she died. Before that death which endeared her to my childish heart there had been a life. A life much less endearing.
She wasn’t just the woman who taught me to crochet, she was also the woman who beat me with a screwdriver because I touched myself in a way she deemed inappropriate at age five. She was the commandeering matriarch whose daughter never learned to swim because there were boys at the pool. She was the woman who would roll over in her grave if she knew my brother married a Jew.
That conflicted nature of legacy and memory lacks half the facets it does for me as it does for my mother, who holds family sacred.
Beyond a single episode of intense physical abuse, my interactions with my grandmother were seldom bad. Maybe because my mother was no longer willing to leave me alone with her, or perhaps simply because those interactions were seldom in general.
But for my mother there existed this delicate balance of how to commemorate. Was she a loving grandmother who would invite her grandchildren over after school, or was she the oddly cruel person who preferred to behead chickens with bare hands rather than a knife?
The truth is, that Virginia Tally was both. Because like all human beings she possessed the indelible duality that makes up our inner selves.
We have a difficult task indemnifying legacies against the ugliness of truth and life. But make no mistake about it, dying doesn’t erase the life you lived.
I had to confront this even more recently when a childhood friend chose to end his own life. Myself and my entire friend group had to confront this. Because in the 14 days since Alex died, his Facebook page has become a realm of toxic positives.
A convenient retelling of his personage as a “beautiful soul” and “life of the party” when described by those who only knew him for a few years.
The truth again, is that Alex Abraham possessed duality, and that the same person who did go out of his way to ensure that everyone in the room was having a good time, is also the person who got high on heroin and did a drive-by shooting in a town of less than 2000 people.
Why he did that, I couldn’t tell you. But I can tell you that prison changed him for the better.
And I can tell you this: that dangerous mistake and its subsequent jail time is probably the only reason he didn’t take his own life 15 years ago. We have prison to thank for the 15 years that we had with him. We got to see him grow out of his anger and into the epitome of a good time.
Because that’s how life works.
We all make mistakes, and regardless of whether we face consequences for them, they shape who we are and carve the path we make going forward.
I don’t think that in death we are absolved of our past and that’s fine. I don’t think that’s the point of having lived it. Our responsibility as those who remember is not to forget the bad things they did, our job is to humanize their mistakes and make them understandable.
Alex Abraham did bad things, but he also made people feel good about themselves. Virginia Tally treated her children and grandchildren with cruelty, but she did it because she thought it the only way to keep us right with the lord.
We do bad things sometimes but those things don’t make us bad people. Ultimately we hope to create a positive legacy by doing enough good to overshadow the bad.
A wise person once said “it’s better to remember how far you’ve come than to forget where you’ve been.”
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