My grandmother had a blue couch. A little deeper than baby blue. It was velvet, or something like it. I can’t be sure because no one was allowed to touch it. Unless it was Christmas, and even then, you'd better be really careful sitting on it.
I thought about that blue couch this week. I thought about what my grandmother said to me not long before dementia finished taking her mind.
She said, “I should have let people sit on the couch.”
I didn’t quite catch what she was trying to tell me. I didn’t know if we were having a mixed moment where the present and past were colliding or if she was fully aware of what she was saying. The words seemed to come from nowhere, so I asked what she meant.
“That couch, I should have let people sit on it.”
I follow her finger to the blue couch that was sitting “up yonder”.
“I worried so much about people messing up that couch that we never got to sit on it.”
We both stared at the couch. She was right, she did. And the couch, at least a couple of decades old, looked brand new.
My grandmother was very particular about her home. She would meet you at the door and wipe your feet with a wet paper towel before you could set a foot inside. She was so meticulous about cleanliness that she installed pure white carpet, and it stayed that way.
I believe the need to control and protect her space was born out of the experiences she refused to talk about.
The memory of her talking about the couch has stayed with me for a few reasons.
My grandmother and I spent a lot of time together, but I don’t have many memories of hearing her thoughts. She had opinions on this or that, but I knew nothing about her inner world. Her reflective, internal thoughts.
As I go through different phases or seasons of life, I often wonder what she would have done or had to say about things. It bothers me that I don’t really know. I can’t even imagine a scenario and think, “yes, this is what Grandma would tell me to do”.
My grandmother guarded her life like she guarded that couch and her white carpet. For her, the past was the past, and she left it there. She left it there so well that if you dared to ask about it, her anger would make you wish you hadn’t. Was the weight too heavy to acknowledge? Did she learn it’s not safe to let it out? I’ll never know her reasons, but they were hers.
Maybe, in a way, she realized that protecting the couch was an outward display of how she protected her heart.
I feel a sense of awe and quiet admiration when I think about the things she endured and carried through life. Emotional weight pressing on small shoulders you would never guess could carry the world. And I wonder if she ever let anyone in.
I wish she had let me sit on the couch. Not for me, but for her.
Women’s Wisdom Series: Women Before Me