There's No Keeping Grandma Quiet

Dan Donohue's Ballad to The Family Member Who Ruins Thanksgiving. Please upgrade your subscription for more!

Much has been said about family members monopolizing conversations at holidays like Thanksgiving and changing the mood of things from festive to combative. Many people will say that they hope their uncles don't get drunk this year at Christmas, because they’ll start talking about crime statistics and keeping Muslims out of NASCAR. Some people go to family gatherings like they’re preparing for battle when they know they will see their less-desirable family members, coming up with retorts and rebuttals to inflammatory statements that will almost certainly be made by an aunt who has fallen down some strange internet sinkhole. I was lucky--the person in my family who would take pleasant conversation and make it their own was not a conservative uncle or a crackpot third cousin, it was my grandma. I would drive to family gatherings excited, not because I particularly like the formality of those kinds of get togethers, but because I knew my grandma would do something to make everyone uncomfortable, and that made all the strange handshakes and mindnumbing platitudes worth it. I was a little disturbed as a kid, and there's an old saying about art that applies to my relationship with my grandma perfectly if you replace the word “art” with “grandma:”

“Grandma comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.”

When I was about 14 years old, I saw a copy of the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I've grown to really like Hunter S. Thompson, but at the time I had never read a word of his work. It was the cover that interested me. The cover depicted two psychotic, vaguely human-looking characters in a car driving down a stretch of road to a city in the distance. The image is trying to evoke the erratic, unyielding psychosis drugs can induce, but it didn't have that effect on me. When I first saw the book cover, I thought this reminds me of when Grandma would pick me up from the bus. The only difference being that one of the characters is throwing a beer can out the window. My grandma abhorred many things, littering being towards the top of the list.

From what I understand about grandmothers, mine is fairly unique. First off, she's still alive. The women in my family have two things in common: their husbands die, and they live to 100 years old. I think if a doctor were to study my family and give me health advice, they would probably tell me to start knitting and get a husband. The second thing that sets my grandma apart is that she functions as more of an uncle at family gatherings. On holidays or celebrations, it's usually an uncle who gets too drunk and too political and is talked about in hushed tones by the rest of the family as the leftovers are scraped into tupperware. My grandmother shows a woman can do anything a man can, and she could do it sober, or at least off of only two white zinfandels.

My grandma is also staunchly political, but not in the same way most elderly people are. Her opinions oscillate between center left and far left, but she's militant about all of them. For example, she has what I would call an "abortion first" protocol when it comes to hearing about someone getting pregnant. If you tell my grandma "Oh my god! I just found out my sister is pregnant," my grandma will say, "is she going to get it taken care of?" And when you reply, "Um... no, she and her husband have been trying for a baby for months," my grandma will go "Oh, well that's wonderful dear, congratulations." It may sound dark to some, but to me it’s sunk in and is sort of a hopeful thought. Whenever I see a woman who gave birth, my thought isn't “she had a baby,” it's “she didn't have an abortion.” It puts a little more agency on the side of the mother, and it lets the baby know it was lucky.

When I was twelve, I transferred to a school in Barrington, Rhode Island that catered to special needs students. There was a van that would bring us back and drop us off in Dartmouth, MA, but that was still about a fifteen minute drive from my house. Both of my parents worked, so often my grandma would pick me up. Those fifteen minute spurts of dialog constituted my formal introduction to politics, history, and true crime. I would be sitting in the bus on the way to Dartmouth, thinking of what subject I wanted to bring up to Grandma in the car. This was still before the internet flooded the formative experiences of America's youth and caused a flattening of information. Much like the internet, I could ask my grandma about any subject, and she would answer quickly and succinctly. “Why are we in Iraq?” I would ask, and my grandma would answer, “Because the president is an evil piece of shit who wants to give all his friends who work for Lockheed Martin and Blackwater a taste of blood money.” She would say this while driving the car directly in the center of the median. I think the things my grandma said stuck with me because I was in a life-or-death situation in the passenger seat every time she would answer my questions.

My grandma didn’t only talk to me about politics. When I was 11, I asked her, “Where do babies come from?”

Without hesitation, she responded, “A man gets an erection, and has vaginal intercourse with a woman. Once he ejaculates--”

“Woah, woah. Slow down, Grandma--let me get a pen and paper.”

You might be uncomfortable with the idea of a 75-year-old woman describing to her 11-year-old grandson what sex is, and you might be right, but let me tell you from experience that I think it's a great way to ensure that your sex talk doesn’t lead to your child becoming interested in sex. I didn't have sex until my much later teens, well after all of my friends. I think it's because when the subject of sex came to mind I thought, “what, that thing grandmas talk about? No thank you, ma’am.”

A lot has been said about people being “unfiltered,” but I think that's a misunderstood term. When someone is said to be “unfiltered,” it usually means they will say a few rude things if you go out to dinner with them. From my experience, these people actually tend to be extremely filtered. They just filter out kind or generous thoughts and tell you the negative ones. My grandma was truly unfiltered--you got the good and you got the bad in equal parts. I would be in the passenger seat of her car and she would tell me about her vacation to Algeria when she was 35: the stunning architecture and beautiful food, the enchanting history and mesmerizing music. Then suddenly, she would say, “but one night, we got a meal at a restaurant on the outskirts of town and had diarrhea for five days. I thought I was going to waste away and flush all my internal organs down the drain.” I thought to myself, as she swerved, barely missing a man who was crossing the street, someday I’ll go to Algeria and bring my own food.

Maybe it was because I got to experience my grandma one-on-one over many years, but I always felt like I took to her personality more than many members of my family. I remember one dinner, after she’d had her maximum allotment of white zinfandel, she started talking about notable murders that happened in New Bedford, the city she lived in her whole life. I believe the dinner was a celebration for my mother, who got her bachelor's degree after decades of having to put it off due to life obligations, but when Grandma starts going she has an uncanny ability to shift a conversation to her own agenda. My cousin, aunt, uncle, and mother all tried diverting the conversation away from death to anything else, but Grandma wouldn't have it.

“--and that's when he took her body to the attic and started to dismember her. This all happened on the south end of New Bedford, so the houses were more spaced out and it was harder for people to hear her scream,” she said.

Then my uncle tried to interject by saying something like, “The south end has really good fishing; it's hard to launch your boat though, because there are so many jagged rocks.”

My grandma then immediately grabbed the reins back by saying, “You think that's hard? Try dragging a body into an attic. I mean, why would you not take it into the basement? Was he making a point?”

Eventually my family gave up, replacing conversation with knowing conspiratorial glances with one another, their expressions conveying frustration as if to say here we go again. I, on the other hand, was enthralled. My grandma would often speak to me about historical events involving death and atrocity, and it impressed me that she could keep so much carnage in her head at once. Her intent was certainly not malicious--she simply did not have the barriers in her brain that separated horror from the rest of life. To her it was all the same thing; a dismembered body and her daughter's graduation occupied the same plane of existence.

We drove home with my aunt and cousin. My cousin, Rick, barely waited for the car door to close before saying, “wow, that was a lot from Grandma, huh?” Everyone in the car agreed, but I stayed quiet. The reason I appreciated my grandma's interjection of blood and guts was because to me it perfectly encapsulated the issues I've always had when it comes to the sterility of my east coast, tight-lipped upbringing. I suffered through so much boring conversation when I knew in my heart there were so many more interesting things bubbling below the surface, if only they could be addressed. I'm not saying you should browbeat people with your harrowing life events, but you also shouldn't ignore them completely. My grandma would kick open the door of pleasantries and say, “look! Look at all this stuff we aren't talking about! Isn't that interesting?” And it was--to me, at least.

I understand when people are made uncomfortable by their inflammatory family members, but I pose the question: what else would you be talking about? Say what you will about my grandma, but when she's at the table the question of “what else do we talk about?” has never come up. She's in her 90s now, and has lost a bit of her zeal for conversation, but she’s still all there--you just have to kick start it all a little bit. Recently, I saw her when I visited home. Soon into the conversation I said, “Hey Grandma, what do you think about this administration?” and she quickly replied, “Well I'll tell you what I think about this administration!” And I sat back and relaxed, knowing she would take it from there.