Selected Pieces - Nonfiction

by Hannah Gumpert

There is a set of knives, silver and shiny, in a wooden block on my kitchen counter. Big knives and little knives and knives that aren’t big or little, but they are my favorite because they are easy to use, just right for slicing bread or cutting fruit. But sometimes when I hold them I get scared, my fingers getting all shaky on the knife’s handle and making the blade quiver and catch the light, because if I trip, I’ll stab myself, and when you stab yourself with a knife, you die. And what happens when you die? Light, dark, oblivion—no one knows, not really.

I do, though. When you die, you forget. There’s nothing left in a dead person that can remember, not when your neurons stop sparking like stars and turn into black holes. Everything becomes nothing. 

But forgetting, it happens to the people around you, too. When you die, you forget and you’re forgotten, no matter how hard they try to remember. Like my Abuelita, with her skin like bread—soft and chapped and brown—and her house that smelled like dogs and wet dirt, who died when I was five and forgot. On her birthday, Papa gets sad and listens to her favorite music and takes us to the Huntington Gardens because it was her favorite place, and he remembers, because the forgetting hasn’t consumed him yet completely, but I don’t. Abuelita, I’m sorry I forgot you. Forgetting is a death of its own. So I’ll try. For you. For me. I’ll try to remember.

My recollections are raggedy and worn, a blanket that’s been loved too much. Like how, when I was little and Abuelita was still alive, we all used to pack into our car, Alexander and Mama and Papa and me, but not Gael because he wasn’t born yet, all of us smushed in with the luggage, and we’d drive across the border to visit her. And she was there, waiting for us, in her wheelchair because of the stroke, with a jar full of sugar cookies for Alexander and me set out on the counter, bigger than our heads and round as the moon. And maybe her little dogs ran and yappity-yapped, excited about visitors, and maybe she hugged me tight and told me she loved me, but I can’t remember. And then she was gone, and Papa cried, and we drove down to Mexico for the last time to throw her ashes to the wind. But as the gray powder scattered into the air, I forgot more than just my grandmother.

Abuelita, would you be ashamed of me for choosing to take Latin instead of Spanish? Would you be ashamed of Papa for not teaching me the language you grew up with, the language with soft silvery sounds that are foreign to my tongue? For not passing on the culture and traditions you were so proud of? Abuelita, I make tamales once a year with Papa and Uncle David, but I light the shabbat candles every week. Mama, Papa, Gael, Alexander, and me, and even Toby nosing his furry face around  underneath us in search of scraps, all sit around the table and sing the Shabbat prayers in Hebrew, but we never utter a word of Spanish. We light the candles and drink grape juice because we can’t have wine, and then Mama tells me to get out the challah. It’s soft and chapped and brown, but not like your skin, Abuelita, because your skin was bolillos and conchas, not challah. And when I take out a knife to cut into the fluffy bread, the one that isn’t big or little but just right, I hold it careful in my hands, like a baby bird or a bomb. Because if I stab myself, I’ll die, and when I die, I will forget. 

But then I blink, and a tear slips down my cheek, because I’m still alive—but I’m forgetting things already.